“I was talking to a lawyer.”
“I know that already,” said my mother. “What I need is for you to tell me about it with the frankness I deserve.”
My mother admitted afterward that she was the one who was terrified at the can of worms she might have opened without realizing it, for if he dared tell her the truth it was because he thought she already knew everything, or that he would have to tell her everything.
That was the case. Papá confessed that he had received notification of a criminal complaint against him for having abused in his consulting room a sick woman whom he had drugged with an injection of morphine. It must have happened in a forgotten jurisdiction where he had spent brief periods of time to attend patients without money. And he gave immediate proof of his rectitude: the melodramatic tale of anesthesia and rape was a criminal slander by his enemies, but the boy was his, conceived under normal circumstances.
It was not easy for my mother to avoid the scandal, because someone very influential was standing in the shadows and manipulating the strings of the plot. There was the precedent of Abelardo and Carmen Rosa, who had lived with us at various times and had everyone’s affection, but both of them had been born before her marriage. Yet my mother overcame her rancor at the bitter pill of a new child and her husband’s infidelity, and fought at his side in a public way until they had discredited the lie about the rape.
Peace returned to the family. However, a short while later, confidential news came from the same region about a little girl with a different mother whom Papá had recognized as his, and who was living in deplorable conditions. My mother wasted no time on quarrels and suppositions, but did battle to bring her to the house. “Mina did the same thing with all of Papá’s scattered children,” she said on that occasion, “and she never had any reason to regret it.” And so she succeeded on her own in having the girl sent to her, with no public furor, and she mixed her into the already numerous family.
All of this was past history when my brother Jaime met a boy identical to our brother Gustavo at a party in another town. It was the son who had caused the legal complaint, well brought up and pampered by his mother. But our mother took all kinds of measures and brought him home to live with the family—when there already were eleven of us—and helped him to learn a trade and become established in life. Then I could not hide my astonishment that a woman whose jealousy was hallucinatory could have been capable of such actions, and she herself responded with a sentence that I have preserved ever since as if it were a diamond:
“Well, the same blood that’s in my children’s veins just can’t go wandering around out there.”
I saw my brothers and sisters only on my annual vacations. After each trip it was harder for me to recognize them and take a new memory away with me. In addition to our baptismal name, we all had another that the family gave us to make daily life easier, and it was not a diminutive but a casual nickname. From the moment I was born they called me Gabito—an unusual diminutive of Gabriel along the Guajira coast—and I have always felt it was my given name, and that Gabriel is the diminutive. Someone surprised by this capricious saints’ calendar used to ask why our parents had not decided once and for all to baptize all their children with nicknames.
However, this liberal feeling of my mother’s seemed contrary to her attitude toward her two oldest daughters, Margot and Aida, on whom she tried to impose the same severity that her mother had imposed on her because of her obstinate love for my father. She wanted to move to another town. Papá, on the other hand, who did not need to hear that twice to pack his suitcases and begin roaming the world, was reluctant this time. Several days went by before I learned that the problem was that the two oldest girls were in love with two different men, of course, but who both had the same name: Rafael. When I heard about it I could not control my laughter because of the memory of the horror novel that Papá and Mamá had lived through, and I told her so.
“It’s not the same,” she said.
“It is the same,” I insisted.
“All right,” she conceded, “it is the same, but two at the same time.”
As had been the case in her day, reasons and arguments were of no use. No one ever learned how our parents found out, because each sister, on her own, had taken precautions not to be discovered. But the witnesses were the most unexpected ones, because these same sisters had sometimes arranged to be accompanied by younger siblings who could vouch for their innocence. Most surprising of all was that Papá also participated in the ambush, not with direct actions but with the same passive resistance that my grandfather Nicolás had used against his daughter.
“We would go to a dance and my papá would come in and take us home if he found that the Rafaels were there,” Aida Rosa has recounted in a newspaper interview. They did not have permission to take a walk in the country or go to the movies, or they were sent with people who would not let them out of their sight. Each girl, on her own, invented useless pretexts for keeping their romantic appointments, and that was where an invisible phantom appeared and betrayed them. Ligia, who was younger than they, earned a reputation as a spy and an informer, but she excused herself with the argument that jealousy among siblings is another form of love.
During that vacation I tried to intercede with my parents so they would not repeat the mistakes that my mother’s parents had made with her, and they always found complicated reasons for not understanding. The most terrible was the one about the pasquines, the anonymous scandal sheets that were posted in public and disclosed horrifying secrets—real or invented—even in the least suspect families. They revealed hidden paternities, shameful adulteries, perversions in bed that somehow had entered the public domain by paths less straightforward than the pasquines. But none of them had ever denounced anything that in some way was not known, no matter how hidden it had been kept, or that was not bound to happen sooner or later. “You yourself make your own pasquines,” one of their victims used to say.
What my parents did not foresee was that their daughters would defend themselves with the same means they had used. They sent Margot to study in Montería, and Aida made the decision to go to Santa Marta. They were boarders, and on their free days there was someone who had been forewarned to accompany them, but they always arranged to communicate with their distant Rafaels. But my mother achieved what her parents did not achieve with her. Aida spent half her life in the convent and lived there without grief or glory until she felt safe from men. Margot and I were always united by memories of our shared childhood when I would keep an eye on the adults so they would not catch her eating dirt. In the end she became like a second mother to everyone, in particular Cuqui, the one who needed her most, and she kept him with her until his last breath.
Only today do I realize how much my mother’s unhappy state of mind and the internal tensions in the house were in accord with the fatal contradictions in the country that had not surfaced yet but did exist. President Lleras would have to hold elections in the new year, and the future looked dark. The Conservatives, who had managed to bring down López, played a double game with his successor: they flattered him for his mathematical impartiality but fomented discord in the Province in order to regain power either by persuasion or by force.
Sucre had remained immune to violence, and the few cases that anyone recalled had nothing to do with politics. One had been the murder of Joaquín Vega, a very sought-after musician who played the saxhorn in the local band. They were playing at seven in the evening at the entrance to the movie theater, and a relative of his cut his throat when it was puffed out by the pressure of the music he was playing, and he bled to death on the ground. Both men were well loved in the town, and the only known but unconfirmed explanation was that it had been an affair of honor. The birthday of my sister Rita was being celebrated at the same time, and the shock of the bad news ruined the party that had been scheduled to last for many more hours.
The other duel, which occurred much earlier but was indelible in t
he town’s memory, was the one between Plinio Balmaceda and Dionisiano Barrios. The first was a member of an old and respectable family, an enormous, charming man but also a troublemaker with a wicked temper when he crossed paths with alcohol. In his right mind he had the airs and graces of a gentleman, but when he drank too much he was transformed into a bully with an easy revolver and a riding whip in his belt to use on anyone he took a dislike to. Even the police tried to keep him at a distance. The members of his good family, tired of dragging him home each time he had too much to drink, at last abandoned him to his fate.
Dionisiano Barrios was just the opposite: a timid, impaired man, an enemy of brawls and abstemious by nature. He never had problems with anyone until Plinio Balmaceda began to provoke him with vile jokes about his impairment. He did what he could to avoid him, until the day Balmaceda crossed paths with him and cut his face with the whip because he felt like it. Then Dionisiano overcame his timidity, his hump, and his bad luck, and he confronted the aggressor with a gun. It was an instantaneous duel in which both men received serious wounds, but only Dionisiano died.
The historic duel in the town, however, caused the twin deaths of this same Plinio Balmaceda and Tasio Ananías, a police sergeant famous for his ethical behavior, the exemplary son of Mauricio Ananías, who played drums in the same band in which Joaquín Vega played the saxhorn. It was a formal duel in the middle of the street, each man’s wounds were grave, and each endured a long death agony in his house. Plinio regained consciousness almost at once, and his immediate concern was with Ananías’s fate. Tasio, in turn, was struck by the concern with which Plinio asked about him. Each began to pray that the other not die, and their families kept them informed as long as their souls were in their bodies. The entire town lived in suspense while all kinds of efforts were made to prolong both their lives.
After forty-eight hours of their death agony, the church bells tolled for a woman who had just died. The dying men heard the bells, and each in his bed believed they were tolling for the death of the other. Ananías died of grief almost at once, weeping over the death of Plinio. Plinio learned this and died two days later, weeping copious tears for Sergeant Ananías.
In a town of peaceable friends like this one, violence during those years had a less fatal but no less harmful expression: pasquines. Terror lived in the houses of the great families, who waited for the next morning as if it were a fateful lottery. Where least expected a punitive sheet of paper would appear, which was a relief for what it did not say about you, and at times a secret fiesta for what it did say about others. My father, perhaps the most peaceable man I have ever known, oiled the venerable revolver he had never fired and loosened his tongue in the billiard hall.
“Whoever even thinks about touching any of my daughters,” he shouted, “will taste the lead of an angry man.”
Several families began an exodus for fear the pasquines were a prelude to the police violence that was devastating entire towns in the interior of the country in order to intimidate the opposition.
Tension was transformed into another kind of daily bread. At first furtive patrols were organized, not so much to discover the authors of the pasquines as to learn what the sheets said before they were destroyed at dawn. A group of us who were out late found a city official at three in the morning, enjoying the cool air in the doorway of his house but in reality watching to see who put up the pasquines. My brother said to him, half as a joke and half in a serious way, that some told the truth. The official took out his revolver and pointed it at him, the hammer cocked.
“Repeat that!”
Then we learned that on the previous night they had put up a truthful pasquín aimed at his unmarried daughter. But the facts were common knowledge, even in her own house, and the only person who did not know them was her father.
At first it was evident that the pasquines had been written by the same person, with the same brush, on the same paper, but in a business district as small as the one on the square, only one store could sell these items, and the owner hastened to prove his innocence. Then I knew that one day I was going to write a novel about them, not because of what they said, which almost always were fantasies in the public domain, and with little wit, but because of the unbearable tension they managed to create inside the houses.
In my third novel, In Evil Hour, written twenty years later, it seemed an act of simple decency not to use concrete or identifiable cases, even though some of the real ones were better than those invented by me. Besides, there was no need to, because I was always more interested in the social phenomenon than in the private lives of the victims. I learned only after it had been published that in the poor districts, where those of us who lived on the main square were disliked, many pasquines were reasons for celebration.
The truth is that the pasquines served only as a point of departure for me in a plot I never managed to make real, because what I was writing demonstrated that the fundamental problem was political and not moral, as people believed. I always thought that Nigromanta’s husband was a good model for the military magistrate in In Evil Hour, but while I was developing him as a character he was seducing me as a human being, and I had no reason to kill him, for I discovered that a serious writer cannot kill a character without a persuasive reason, and I did not have one.
Today I realize that the novel itself could be another novel. I wrote it in a student hotel on the Rue Cujas, in the Latin Quarter in Paris, a hundred meters from the Boulevard Saint Michel, while the days passed without mercy as I waited for a check that never arrived. When I thought it was finished, I rolled up the pages, tied them with one of the three neckties I had worn in better days, and buried it at the back of the closet.
Two years later, in Mexico City, I did not even know where it was when I was asked to enter it in a novel competition sponsored by Esso Colombiana, with a prize of three thousand dollars in those times of famine. The emissary was the photographer Guillermo Angulo, my old Colombian friend, who knew about the existence of the first draft that I had been writing in Paris, and he took it just as it was, still tied with the necktie, and there was not even time to smooth out the wrinkles with steam because of the pressures of the deadline. I submitted it without any hope for a prize that would have been enough money to buy a house. But just as I had submitted it, it was declared the winner by a distinguished panel of judges on April 16, 1962, almost at the exact moment that our second son, Gonzalo, was born, his loaf of bread under his arm.*
We had not even had time to think about it when I received a letter from Father Félix Restrepo, the president of the Colombian Academy of the Language, an upright man who had presided over the panel for the prize but did not know the title of the novel. Only then did I realize that in our last-minute rush I had forgotten to write the title on the first page: This Shit-eating Town.
Father Restrepo was scandalized when he heard it, and through Germán Vargas he asked me in the most amiable way to change it for one less brutal and more in line with the atmosphere of the book. After many exchanges with him, I decided on a title that perhaps would not say much about the drama but would serve as a banner for navigating the seas of sanctimony: In Evil Hour.
One week later, Dr. Carlos Arango Vélez, Colombia’s ambassador to Mexico and a recent candidate for the presidency of the Republic, made an appointment to see me in his office in order to inform me that Father Restrepo was pleading that I change two words that seemed inadmissible in the text that had won the prize: condom and masturbation. The ambassador and I could not hide our astonishment, but we agreed that we ought to satisfy Father Restrepo and bring the interminable competition to a happy conclusion with an even-tempered solution.
“Very well, Señor Ambassador,” I said. “I’ll eliminate one of the two words, but you’ll please choose which one.”
With a sigh of relief the ambassador eliminated the word masturbation. And so the conflict was resolved, and the book was published by Editorial Iberoamericana in Madrid, with a large
printing and a stellar launching. It was bound in leather, with impeccable print on excellent paper. But it was an ephemeral honeymoon, because I could not resist the temptation of doing an exploratory reading, and I discovered that the book written in my Indian language had been dubbed—like the movies in those days—into the purest Madrid dialect.
I had written: “Así como ustedes viven ahora, no sólo están en una situación insegura sino que constituyen un mal ejemplo para el pueblo.” The transcription by the Spanish editor made my skin crawl: “Así como vivís ahora, no sólo estáis en una situación insegura, sino que constituís un mal ejemplo para el pueblo.”* Even more serious: since this sentence was said by a priest, the Colombian reader might think it was the author’s sly way of indicating that the cleric was Spanish, which would complicate his behavior and altogether change an essential aspect of the drama. Not content with touching up the grammar in the dialogues, the proofreader permitted himself to change the style with a heavy hand, and the book was filled with Madrilenian patches that had nothing to do with the original. As a consequence, I had no recourse but to withdraw my permission from the edition because I considered it adulterated, and to retrieve and burn the copies that had not yet been sold. The reply of those responsible was absolute silence.
From that moment on I considered the novel unpublished, and I devoted myself to the difficult task of translating it back into my Caribbean dialect, because the only original version was the one I had submitted to the competition, which had then been sent to Spain for the Iberoamericana edition. Once the original text had been reestablished, and corrected, in passing, one more time by me, Editorial Era in Mexico brought it out with the express printed notice that this was the first edition.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 26
