Living to Tell the Tale

by Gabriel García Márquez

  Today I realize that my beggar’s appearance was not because I was poor or a poet but because my energies were concentrated in a profound way on the stubborn difficulties of learning to write. As soon as I could see the right path I left The Skyscraper and moved to the tranquil El Prado district, its urban and social opposite, two blocks from the house of Meira Delmar and five from the historic hotel where the sons of the rich danced with their virgin sweethearts after Sunday Mass. Or as Germán said: I began to improve for the worse.

  I lived in the house of the Ávila sisters—Esther, Mayito, and Toña—whom I had known in Sucre, and who for some time had been bent on saving me from perdition. Instead of a cardboard cubicle where I shed so many of the scales I had accumulated as a spoiled grandson, I had my own bedroom with a private bath and a window overlooking the garden, and three meals a day for very little more than my carter’s salary. I bought a pair of trousers and half a dozen tropical shirts printed with flowers and birds, which for a time won me secret fame as a shipboard faggot. Old friends whom I had not run into again I now found everywhere I went. I discovered to my delight that they quoted from memory the nonsense from “La Jirafa,” were devoted fans of Crónica because of what they called its sportsmanlike integrity, and even read my stories without really understanding them. I ran into Ricardo González Ripoll, my dormitory neighbor at the Liceo Nacional, who had settled in Barranquilla with his architect’s degree and in less than a year had resolved his life with a tail-finned Chevrolet of uncertain age into which he could pack up to eight passengers at dawn. Three times a week he would pick me up at home early in the evening to go carousing with new friends obsessed with setting the country to rights, some with formulas of political magic and others by fighting with the police.

  When she learned of these developments, my mother sent me a message very typical of her: “Money calls to money.” I did not tell the members of the group anything about the change until one night when I met them at the table in the Café Japy, and I seized on the brilliant formula of Lope de Vega: “I took orders, and so it suited me to order my life in line with my disorder.” I do not remember comparable catcalls even in a soccer stadium. Germán wagered I would not have a single idea away from The Skyscraper. According to Álvaro, I would not survive the cramps that come with three meals a day at regular hours. Alfonso, on the other hand, protested the abusiveness of intervening in my private life and buried the subject with a discussion regarding the urgency of making radical decisions about the future of Crónica. I think at bottom they felt guilty about my disorder but were too decent not to give thanks for my decision with a sigh of relief.

  Contrary to expectations, my health and morale improved. I was reading less because of lack of time, but I raised the tone of “La Jirafa” and forced myself to continue writing Leaf Storm in my new room, on the prehistoric typewriter that Alfonso Fuenmayor lent me, during the small hours I had wasted earlier with Mono Guerra. On a normal afternoon in the newsroom at the paper I could write “La Jirafa,” an editorial, some of my many unsigned articles, the condensation of a detective story, and last-minute pieces before Crónica went to press. It was fortunate that instead of becoming easier as the days passed, the novel-in-progress began to impose its own criteria in opposition to mine, and I was ingenuous enough to understand this as a symptom of favorable winds.

  My mood was so resolute that in an emergency I improvised my tenth story—“Someone Is Messing Up These Roses,” because the political commentator for whom we had reserved three pages in Crónica for a last-minute article had suffered a serious heart attack. I discovered only when I corrected the printed proof of my story that it was another static drama of the kind I wrote without thinking. This reversal intensified my remorse for having awakened a friend a little before midnight so that he would write the article in less than three hours. In this penitential spirit I wrote the story in the same amount of time, and on Monday I again brought up to the editorial board the urgency of our going out on the street to pull the magazine out of its doldrums with hard-hitting articles. But the idea—which was everyone’s—was rejected once again with an argument favorable to my happiness: given the idyllic notion we had about reporting, if we went out on the street the magazine would never again come out on time—if it came out at all. I should have understood this as a compliment, but I never could overcome the disagreeable idea that the real reason was their unpleasant memory of my article on Berascochea.

  A good consolation at that time was the telephone call from Rafael Escalona, the composer of the songs that were sung and are still being sung on this side of the world. Barranquilla was a vital center because of frequent visits from the troubadours of the accordion whom we had met at the fiestas in Aracataca, and because of their intense exposure on the radio stations along the Caribbean coast. A very well-known singer at the time was Guillermo Buitrago, who boasted of keeping new songs from the Province up-to-date. Another who was very popular was Crescencio Salcedo, a barefoot Indian who would stand on the corner of the Americana to sing without ceremony songs of his own and other people’s creation, in a voice that had some tin in it, but with a very personal art that imposed itself on the daily crowd on Calle San Blas. I had spent a good part of my early youth standing near him, not even greeting him, not letting myself be seen, until I learned by heart his vast repertoire of everybody’s songs.

  The culmination of that passion reached its climax one torpid afternoon when the telephone interrupted me as I was writing “La Jirafa.” A voice like those of so many people I knew in my childhood greeted me with no preliminary formulas:

  “What’s doing, brother? I’m Rafael Escalona.”

  Five minutes later we met at a reserved table in the Café Roma to begin a lifelong friendship. As soon as we exchanged greetings I began to press Escalona to sing his latest songs. Isolated lines, in a voice that was very low and well modulated, which he accompanied by drumming his fingers on the table. In each stanza the popular poetry of our lands strolled by wearing a new dress. “I’ll give you a bouquet of forget-me-nots so you’ll do what their meaning says,” he sang. For my part, I showed him that I knew by heart the best songs of his home, which I had pulled since I was very young from the tumultuous river of the oral tradition. But what surprised him most was that I talked to him about the Province as if I knew it.

  Days earlier, Escalona had traveled by bus from Villanueva to Valledupar while he composed in his mind the music and lyrics of a new song for Carnival on the following Sunday. It was his primary method because he did not know how to write music or play any instrument. In one of the towns along the way, a wandering troubadour with sandals and an accordion got on the bus, one of the countless men who traveled the region from fair to fair to sing. Escalona had him sit beside him and sang into his ear the two completed stanzas of his new song.

  The happy troubadour got off in the middle of the road, and Escalona stayed on the bus until Valledupar, where he had to go to bed to sweat out the 104-degree fever of a common cold. Three days later was the Sunday of Carnival, and the unfinished song that Escalona had sung in secret to his passing friend swept away all the music, old and new, from Valledupar to Cabo de la Vela. Only he knew who had divulged it while he was sweating out his Carnival fever, and gave it the name “La vieja Sara.”

  The story is true but not strange in a region and in a guild where the most natural thing is what is astonishing. The accordion, not a native or widespread instrument in Colombia, is popular in the province of Valledupar and may have been imported from Aruba and Curaçao. During the Second World War its importation from Germany was interrupted, and those that were already in the Province survived because of the care given them by their native owners. One was Leandro Díaz, a carpenter who not only was an inspired composer and master of the accordion, but the only man during the war who knew how to repair them even though he was blind from birth. The way of life of these genuine troubadours is to go from town to town and sing the amusing and sim
ple facts of ordinary history, at religious or pagan celebrations, and above all in the wild confusion of Carnival. Rafael Escalona’s case was different. The son of Colonel Clemente Escalona, the nephew of the celebrated Bishop Celedón, and the holder of a baccalaureate from the liceo in Santa Marta that bears his name, he began to compose when he was very young, scandalizing his family who considered singing with an accordion something that day laborers did. Not only was he the only troubadour with a baccalaureate degree, he was one of the few in those days who knew how to read and write, and the haughtiest, most amorous man who ever existed. But he is not and will not be the last: now there are hundreds of them, younger and younger each day. Bill Clinton understood it this way in the final days of his presidency, when he listened to a group of primary-school children who traveled from the Province to sing for him at the White House.

  During those days of good fortune I happened to run into Mercedes Barcha, the daughter of the pharmacist in Sucre to whom I had been proposing marriage since she was thirteen. In contrast to those other times, at last she accepted an invitation to go dancing the following Sunday at the hotel in El Prado. Only then did I learn that she had moved to Barranquilla with her family because of a political situation that was growing more and more oppressive. Demetrio, her father, was a hardcore Liberal who was not intimidated by the early threats against him when the persecution and social ignominy of the pasquines worsened. But under pressure from his family, he sold off the few things he had left in Sucre and set up his pharmacy in Barranquilla, close to the hotel in El Prado. Although he was the age of my papá, he always maintained a youthful friendship with me that we would heat up at the tavern across the street, and more than once we ended up in a galley slave’s drunken carousing with the entire group at El Tercer Hombre. At that time Mercedes was studying in Medellín and spent time with her family only during Christmas vacation. She always was amusing and amiable with me, but she had an illusionist’s talent for evading questions and answers and not allowing herself to be explicit about anything. I had to accept this as a more compassionate stratagem than indifference or rejection, and I resigned myself to her seeing me with her father and his friends in the tavern across the street. If he did not suspect my interest during that vacation of longing, it was because it was the best-kept secret of the first twenty centuries of Christianity. On various occasions he boasted in El Tercer Hombre about the sentence she had quoted to me in Sucre at our first dance: “My papá says that the prince who will marry me hasn’t been born yet.” I also did not know if she believed him, but she behaved as if she did, until that Christmas holiday when she agreed that we would meet the following Sunday at the morning dance at the hotel in El Prado. I am so superstitious that I attributed her decision to the artist’s hairstyle and mustache that the barber had made for me, and the unbleached linen suit and silk tie bought for the occasion at an auction run by Turks. Certain that she would go there with her father, as she did wherever she went, I also invited my sister Aida Rosa, who was spending her vacation with me. But Mercedes showed up very much alone, and she danced with so much naturalness and so much irony that any serious proposal would have seemed ridiculous to her. That day was the beginning of the unforgettable season of my compadre Pacho Galán, the glorious creator of the merecumbé that was danced for years and gave rise to new Caribbean airs that are still alive. She danced very well to popular music, and she used her mastery to elude with magical subtlety the proposals that pursued her. It seems to me her tactic was to make me believe she did not think I was serious, but with so much skill that I always found the way to move ahead.

  At twelve sharp she became alarmed about the time and left me standing while the music was still playing, but she did not want me to accompany her even to the door. This seemed so strange to my sister that in some way she felt responsible, and I still wonder if that sad example did not have something to do with her sudden decision to enter the Salesian convent in Medellín. In time, after that day, Mercedes and I invented a personal code with which we understood each other without saying anything, and even without seeing each other.

  I heard from her again after a month, on January 22 of the following year, with an unadorned message that she left for me at El Heraldo: “They killed Cayetano.” For us it could be only one person: Cayetano Gentile, our friend in Sucre, a soon-to-be doctor, an organizer of dances, and a lover by trade. The immediate version was that he had been knifed by two brothers of the young teacher at the school in Chaparral: we had seen him ride with her on his horse. In the course of the day, from one telegram to the next, I learned the complete story.

  It was still not the time of easy telephones, and personal long-distance calls were arranged first by telegram. My immediate reaction was a reporter’s. I decided to travel to Sucre to write the story, but at the paper they interpreted this as a sentimental impulse. And today I understand, because even back then we Colombians killed one another for any reason at all, and at times we invented one, but crimes of passion were reserved as luxuries for the rich in the cities. It seemed to me that the subject was eternal and I began to take statements from witnesses, until my mother discovered my hidden intentions and begged me not to write the article. At least while Cayetano’s mother, Doña Julieta Chimento, was alive, the most important of the reasons being that she was my mother’s comadre because she had been godmother at the baptism of Hernando, my brother number eight. Her statement—indispensable in a good article—was of great significance. Two of the teacher’s brothers had pursued Cayetano when he tried to take refuge in his house, but Doña Julieta had hurried to lock the street door because she believed that her son was already in his bedroom. And so he was the one who could not come in, and they stabbed him to death against the locked door.

  My immediate reaction was to sit down to write the report of the crime but I found all kinds of impediments. What interested me was no longer the crime itself but the literary theme of collective responsibility. No argument convinced my mother, however, and it seemed a lack of respect to write it without her permission. But after that not a day went by that I was not hounded by the desire to write the story. I was beginning to become resigned, and then, many years later, I was waiting for a plane to take off at the airport in Algiers. The door to the first-class lounge opened, and an Arab prince came in wearing the immaculate tunic of his lineage, and carrying on his fist a splendid female peregrine falcon that instead of the leather hood of classic falconry wore one of gold encrusted with diamonds. Of course I thought of Cayetano Gentile, who had learned from his father the fine arts of falconry, at first with local sparrow hawks and then with magnificent examples transplanted from Arabia Felix. At the moment of his death he had a professional falcon coop on his farm, with two female cousins and a male trained to hunt partridges, and a Scottish kite skilled in personal defense. I knew about the historic interview of Ernest Hemingway by George Plimpton in The Paris Review regarding the process of transforming a character from real life into a character in a novel. Hemingway said: “If I explained how that is sometimes done, it would be a handbook for libel lawyers.” But after that providential morning in Algiers, my situation was just the opposite: I had no desire to continue living in peace if I did not write the story of the death of Cayetano.

  My mother remained firm in her determination to prevent this despite every argument, until thirty years after the drama, when she herself called me in Barcelona to give me the sad news that Julieta Chimento, Cayetano’s mother, had died without ever getting over the loss of her son. But this time, with her strong moral sense, my mother found no reasons to interfere with the article.

  “I ask only one thing as a mother,” she said. “Treat Cayetano as if he were a son of mine.”

  The story, with the title Chronicle of a Death Foretold, was published two years later. My mother did not read it for a reason that I keep as another of her gems in my personal museum: “Something that turned out so awful in life can’t turn out well in a book.”


  A week after the death of Cayetano, the telephone on my desk rang at five in the afternoon as I was beginning to write my daily assignment at El Heraldo. The call was from my papá, who had just arrived in Barranquilla unannounced and was waiting for me with some urgency at the Café Roma. The tension in his voice frightened me, but I was more alarmed at seeing him as I never had seen him before, disheveled and unshaven, wearing the April 9 sky-blue suit dusty with the suffocating heat of the road, sustained only by the strange placidity of the defeated.

  I was so overwhelmed that I do not feel capable of transmitting the anguish and lucidity with which Papá informed me of the family disaster. Sucre, paradise of the easy life and beautiful girls, had succumbed to the seismic onrush of political violence. The death of Cayetano was no more than a symptom.

  “You don’t realize what that hell is like because you live in this oasis of peace,” he said. “But if we’re still alive there it’s because God knows us.”

  He was one of the few members of the Conservative Party who had not needed to hide from raging Liberals after April 9, and now the same Conservatives who had taken refuge in his shadow were repudiating him for his half-heartedness. He painted a picture for me that was so terrifying—and so real—that it more than justified his rash decision to leave everything behind and take the family to Cartagena. I had no rational or emotional counterargument, but I thought I could slow him down with a solution less radical than an immediate move.