I have never known why In Evil Hour is the only one of my books that transports me to its time and its place on a night with a full moon and spring breezes. It was Saturday, the clouds had gone, and there were too many stars for the sky. It had just struck eleven when I heard my mother in the dining room crooning a love fado to put the baby she was carrying to sleep. I asked her where the music came from and she answered in a manner that was typical of her:
“From the houses of the bandit women.”
She gave me five pesos without my asking because she saw me dressing to go to the fiesta. Before I left she told me with her infallible foresight to leave the door to the courtyard unbarred so I could come back at any time without waking my father. I never got as far as the houses of the bandit women because there was a musicians’ rehearsal in the carpentry shop of Maestro Valdés, whose group Luis Enrique had joined as soon as he returned home.
That year I joined them to play the tiple and sing with their six anonymous maestros until dawn. I always thought my brother was a good guitarist, but on my first night I learned that even his most bitter rivals considered him a virtuoso. There was no better group, and they were so sure of themselves that when someone hired them for a serenade of reconciliation or apology, Maestro Valdés would reassure him ahead of time:
“Don’t worry, we’ll leave her biting her pillow.”
A vacation without him was not the same. He lit up the party when he arrived, and Luis Enrique and he, along with Filadelfo Velilla, played together like professionals. That was when I discovered the loyalty of alcohol and learned to live in the proper way, sleeping by day and singing at night. As my mother said: I had let the dogs loose.
People said all kinds of things about me, and there was a rumor that my mail was delivered not to my parents’ address but to the houses of the bandit women. I became the most dependable client for their epic stews as strong-tasting as tiger bile and iguana fricassees that gave you enough drive for three whole nights. I did not read again or join the routine of the family table. This corresponded to the idea expressed so often by my mother that in my own way I did whatever I wanted, but poor Luis Enrique was the one with the bad reputation. He, without knowing what my mother said, told me during this time: “The only thing they need to say now is that I’m corrupting you and then they’ll send me back to the house of correction.”
At Christmas I decided to escape the annual float competition and fled with two complicit friends to the neighboring town of Majagual. I announced at home that I was going for three days but stayed for ten. The fault lay with María Alejandrina Cervantes, an unbelievable woman I met the first night, with whom I lost my head in the most uproarious carousing of my life. Until the Sunday morning when she did not wake up in my bed, and disappeared forever. Years later I rescued her from my memories, not so much for her charms as for the resonance of her name, and I revived her, to protect another woman in one of my novels, as the owner and madam of a house of pleasure that never existed.
When I went home I found my mother boiling the coffee in the kitchen at five in the morning. In a conspiratorial whisper she told me to stay with her, because my father had just awakened and was prepared to show me that not even on vacation was I as free as I thought. She served me a large cup of unsweetened coffee, even though she knew I did not like it, and had me sit next to the stove. My father came in wearing his pajamas, still in a mood of sleep, and he was surprised to see me with the steaming cup but asked me an oblique question:
“Didn’t you say you didn’t drink coffee?”
Not knowing how to answer him, I invented the first thing that passed through my head:
“I’m always thirsty at this time of day.”
“Like all drunkards,” he replied.
He did not look at me or mention the subject again. But my mother informed me that my father, depressed after that day, had begun to consider me a lost cause though he never let me know it.
My expenses increased so much that I resolved to sack my mother’s reserves. Luis Enrique absolved me with his logical argument that money stolen from your parents, if it is used for the movies and not for whores, is legitimate. I suffered because of the awkwardness of my mother’s complicity in keeping my father from knowing I was on the wrong path. She was right because it was all too obvious at home that at times I was still asleep for no reason at lunchtime, and had the voice of a hoarse rooster, and was so distracted that one day I did not hear two of Papá’s questions, and he assailed me with his harshest diagnosis:
“You have liver trouble.”
In spite of everything, I managed to preserve social appearances. I was well dressed and better behaved at the gala dances and occasional lunches organized by the families on the main square, whose houses were kept closed the whole year and were opened for the Christmas holidays when the students came home.
That was the year of Cayetano Gentile, who celebrated his vacation with three splendid dances. For me they were lucky dates, because at all three I danced with the same partner. I asked her to dance on the first night without bothering to ask who she was, or whose daughter, or who she had come with. She seemed so enigmatic that during the second number I proposed in all seriousness that she marry me, and her response was even more mysterious:
“My papá says that the prince who’s going to marry me hasn’t been born yet.”
Days later I saw her crossing the promenade in the square under the fierce twelve o’clock sun, wearing a radiant organza dress and holding by the hand a boy and a girl about six or seven years old. “They’re mine,” she said, weak with laughter, without my even asking. And she said it with so much perversity that I began to suspect that my proposal of marriage had not been carried away on the wind.
From the time I was an infant in the house in Aracataca I had learned to sleep in a hammock, but only in Sucre did I make it a part of my nature. There is nothing better for taking a siesta, for experiencing the hour of stars, for thinking without haste, for making love without prejudices. The day I came back from my week of dissipation I hung it between two trees in the courtyard, as Papá used to do in other times, and slept with a clear conscience. But my mother, always tormented by her terror that her children would die in their sleep, woke me at the end of the afternoon to find out if I was alive. Then she lay down beside me and with no preambles approached the matter that made it difficult for her to live.
“Your papá and I would like to know what’s happening to you.”
The sentence could not have been better aimed. I had known for some time that my parents shared their uneasiness regarding the changes in my behavior, and that she would improvise trivial explanations to reassure him. Nothing happened in the house that my mother did not know about, and her rages were legendary. But the cup overflowed when for a week I did not get home until broad daylight. My reasonable position would have been to avoid her questions or put them off for a more opportune moment, but she knew that so serious a matter allowed only immediate replies.
All her arguments were legitimate: I would disappear at dusk dressed for a wedding and not come home to sleep, but the next day I dozed in the hammock until after lunch. I had stopped reading, and for the first time since my birth I dared come home not knowing with certainty where I was. “You don’t even look at your brothers and sisters, you mix up their names and ages, and the other day you kissed a grandson of Clemencia Morales thinking he was one of them,” said my mother. But then she became aware of her exaggerations and compensated for them with a simple truth:
“In short, you’ve become a stranger in this house.”
“All of that is true,” I said, “but the reason is very easy: I’m fed up with the whole business.”
“With us?”
My answer could have been affirmative, but it would not have been fair:
“With everything,” I said.
And then I told her about my situation at the liceo. They judged me by my grades, year after year my parents were
proud of the results, they believed I was not only an irreproachable student but also an exemplary friend, the most intelligent and brightest boy, and the one most famous for his congeniality. Or, as my grandmother would say: “The perfect kid.”
But to make a long story short, the truth was just the opposite. I seemed to be that way because I did not have the courage and sense of independence of my brother Luis Enrique, who did only what he wanted to do. And who without a doubt would achieve a happiness that is not what one desires for one’s children but is what allows them to survive the immoderate affections, the irrational fears, and the joyful expectations of their parents.
My mother was crushed by this portrait so contrary to the one they had forged in their solitary dreams.
“Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said after a lethal silence, “because if we tell all this to your father he’ll die a sudden death. Don’t you realize you’re the pride of the family?”
For them it was simple: since there was no possibility I would be the eminent physician my father could not be because he did not have the money, they dreamed I would at least be a professional in something else.
“Well, I won’t be anything at all,” I concluded. “I refuse to let you force me into being what I don’t want to be or what you would like me to be, much less what the government wants me to be.”
The dispute, at cross-purposes and somewhat rambling, went on for the rest of the week. I believe my mother wanted to take the time to talk it over with Papá, and that idea filled me with new courage. One day, as if by chance, she made a surprising proposal:
“They say that if you put your mind to it you could be a good writer.”
I had never heard anything like it in the family. Since I was a child my inclinations had allowed me to suppose that I would draw, be a musician, sing in church, or even be a Sunday poet. I had discovered in myself a tendency, known to everyone, toward writing that was rather convoluted and ethereal, but this time my reaction was one of surprise.
“If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones, and they don’t make them anymore,” I told my mother. “After all, there are better ways to starve to death.”
On one of those afternoons, instead of talking to me she wept without tears. Today I would have become alarmed, because I esteem repressed crying as an infallible device used by great women to impose their purposes. But at the age of eighteen I did not know what to say to my mother, and my silence frustrated her tears.
“All right,” she said, “promise me at least that you’ll finish the baccalaureate the best you can, and I’ll be responsible for arranging the rest with your papá.”
At the same time we both felt the relief of winning. I agreed, as much for her sake as for my father’s, because I feared they would die if we did not come to an understanding soon. This was how we found the easy solution of my studying law and political science, which was not only a good cultural foundation for any kind of occupation, but also a course of study humanized by classes in the morning and free time for working in the afternoon. Concerned as well by the emotional burden my mother had endured during this time, I asked her to prepare the ground for me so I could speak face-to-face with Papá. She objected, certain we would end up in a quarrel.
“There are no two men in this world more similar than you and him,” she told me. “And that’s the worst thing for having a conversation.”
I always believed the opposite. Only now, when I have already gone past all the ages my father was in his long life, have I begun to see myself in the mirror looking much more like him than me.
My mother must have considered that night her crowning achievement, because Papá gathered the whole family around the table and announced with a casual air: “We’ll have a lawyer in the house.” Perhaps fearing that my father would attempt to reopen the debate for the entire family, my mother intervened with her best innocence.
“In our situation, and with this army of children,” she explained to me, “we thought the best solution is the only career you can pay for yourself.”
It was not anywhere near as simple as she said, but for us it might be the lesser evil and its devastation the least bloody. To go on with the game, I asked my father’s opinion, and his answer was immediate and of heartbreaking sincerity:
“What do you want me to say? You’ve broken my heart in two, but at least I still can be proud of helping you be whatever you want to be.”
The height of luxury in that January of 1946 was my first trip in a plane, thanks to José Palencia, who reappeared with a major problem. He had waltzed through five years of the baccalaureate in Cartagena but had just failed the sixth. I committed myself to getting him a place at the liceo so that he would receive his diploma at last, and he invited me to go there with him.
The flight to Bogotá took off twice a week in a DC-3 belonging to LANSA, and the greatest danger was not the plane but the cows that wandered onto the clay runway improvised in a pasture. Sometimes the plane had to fly around in circles until they had finally been shooed away. It was the initial experience in my legendary fear of airplanes, at a time when the Church prohibited them from carrying consecrated Hosts to keep them safe from catastrophes. The flight lasted almost four hours, with no stops, at a speed of three hundred twenty kilometers an hour. Those of us who had made the prodigious river voyage were guided in the sky by the living map of the Great Magdalena River. We recognized the miniature towns, the windup boats, the happy little dolls waving at us from the courtyards of the schools. The flesh-and-blood flight attendants spent their time reassuring the passengers who prayed as they traveled, helping those who were airsick, and convincing a good number that there was no danger of running into the flocks of turkey buzzards that kept an eye on the death down below in the river. Experienced travelers, for their part, recounted historic flights over and over again as feats of courage. The ascent to the altiplano of Bogotá, without a pressurized cabin or oxygen masks, felt like a bass drum in your heart, and the jolts and the hammering of the wings increased the joy of landing. But the greatest surprise was having arrived before our telegrams of the night before.
Passing through Bogotá, José Palencia bought instruments for an entire orchestra, and I do not know if he did it by premeditation or premonition, but from the moment Rector Espitia saw him stride in with guitars, drums, maracas, and harmonicas, I knew he was admitted. For my part, I too felt the weight of my new circumstances as I crossed the threshold: I was a sixth-year student. Until then I had not been aware of bearing on my forehead the star that everyone dreamed of, which could be seen without fail in the way they approached us, in the tone of voice they used to speak to us, even in a certain reverential awe. It was also a year of fiesta. Although the dormitory was only for scholarship students, José Palencia installed himself in the best hotel on the square, one of the women who owned it played the piano, and life was transformed into an entire year of Sundays.
It was another of the leaps in my life. While I was an adolescent my mother would buy me used clothing, which she altered for my younger brothers when I could no longer wear it. The most problematic years were the first two, because wool clothing for the cold climate was expensive and difficult to find. Even though my body did not grow with much enthusiasm, it did not allow time for altering a suit to fit two successive heights in the same year. To make matters worse, the original custom of the boarders, which was to trade clothing, could not be imposed because the items were so well known that the mockery at the expense of the new owners became unbearable. This was resolved in part when Espitia imposed a uniform of a blue jacket and gray trousers, which unified our appearance and hid the secondhand items.
In the third and fourth years I could wear the only suit that the tailor in Sucre altered for me, but in the fifth I had to buy one in very good condition, and by the sixth I could no longer wear it. My father, however, was so enthusiastic about my intention to change that he gave me money to buy a
new suit made to measure, and José Palencia gave me one of his from the previous year, a three-piece camel’s hair that was almost brand new. I soon realized how true it was that the habit does not make the monk. In my new suit, interchangeable with the new uniform, I attended the dances where the boys from the coast reigned, and I only managed to get a girlfriend who lasted less time than a flower.
Espitia welcomed me with unusual enthusiasm. He seemed to teach the two chemistry classes a week only for me, with rapid-fire questions and answers. My obligatory attention was a good starting point for keeping the promise to my parents that I would have an honorable ending. The rest was accomplished by Martina Fonseca’s unique and simple method: pay attention in class in order to avoid staying up all night in fear of the terrifying final exam. It was a wise lesson. When I decided to use it in my last year at the liceo, my anguish subsided. I could answer the teachers’ questions with ease, and they began to be more familiar, and I realized how easy it was to keep the promise I had made to my parents.
My only disturbing problem continued to be the howls of my nightmares. The prefect of discipline, who had very good relations with his students, was Professor Gonzalo Ocampo, and one night during the second semester he tiptoed into the dormitory in the dark to ask me for some keys of his that I had forgotten to return. As soon as he placed his hand on my shoulder, I gave a savage howl that woke up everyone. The next day they moved me to a dormitory for six that had been improvised on the second floor.
It was a solution for my nocturnal fears, but one that was too tempting because it was over the dispensary, and four students from the improvised dormitory slipped down to the kitchens and ransacked them for a midnight supper. Sergio Castro, who was above suspicion, and I, the least daring, stayed in our beds to serve as negotiators in case of emergency. After an hour they returned with half the dispensary ready for us to eat. It was the great feast of our long years as boarders, but it was followed by the indigestion of their finding us out within twenty-four hours. I thought it would all end there, and only the negotiating talent of Espitia saved us from expulsion.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 27
