Living to Tell the Tale

by Gabriel García Márquez

  Another adult drama was growing underground until the bad news broke through the wall in February 1954, and the press published the story that a veteran of the Korean War had pawned his medals in order to eat. He was only one of the more than four thousand who had been recruited at random in another of the inconceivable moments in our history, when any fate was better than nothing for the campesinos expelled at gunpoint from their lands by official violence. The cities, overpopulated by the displaced, offered no hope. Colombia, it was repeated almost every day in editorials, on the street, in the cafés, in family conversations, was unlivable. For many displaced campesinos, and numerous boys with no prospects, the war in Korea was a personal solution. All kinds of people went there, mixed together, without precise criteria, not even for their physical condition, almost in the way the Spaniards came to discover America. When they trickled back to Colombia, that heterogeneous group at last had a common characteristic: they were veterans. It was enough for some to take part in a brawl for the blame to fall on all of them. Doors were closed to them with the facile argument that they had no right to work because their minds were imbalanced. On the other hand, there were never enough tears for the countless numbers who came back transformed into two thousand pounds of ashes.

  The article about the man who pawned his medals showed a brutal contrast to another published ten months earlier, when the last veterans returned to the country with almost a million dollars in cash, and when they were exchanged at the banks they made the price of the dollar in Colombia fall from three pesos, thirty centavos, to two pesos, ninety. But the prestige of the veterans fell lower the more they confronted the reality of their country. Before their return, scattered stories had circulated to the effect that they would receive special scholarships for productive careers, that they would receive pensions for life, that they would have the opportunity to stay and live in the United States. The truth was just the opposite: soon after their arrival they were discharged from the army, and the only thing many of them had left in their pockets were pictures of their Japanese sweethearts left waiting for them at the military camps in Japan where they had been sent on leave from the war.

  It was impossible for that national drama not to remind me of my grandfather Colonel Márquez and his eternal wait for his veteran’s pension. I had come to think that this niggardliness was retaliation against a subversive colonel in a fierce war against the Conservative hegemony. The survivors of Korea, on the other hand, had fought against the cause of Communism and for the imperial yearnings of the United States. Yet on their return they did not appear on the society pages but in the crime reports. One of them, who shot two innocent people to death, asked his judges: “If I killed a hundred in Korea, why can’t I kill ten in Bogotá?”

  This man, like other criminals, had been sent to the war when the armistice had already been signed. But many like him were also victims of Colombian machismo, which manifested itself in the triumph of killing a Korean veteran. It had been less than three years since the first contingent had come back, and the veterans who were the victims of violent deaths already numbered more than a dozen. For a variety of reasons, several had died in pointless fights soon after their return. One of them was stabbed to death in a brawl because he repeated a song on a tavern jukebox. Sergeant Cantor, who had honored his name by singing and accompanying himself on the guitar during breaks in the fighting,* was shot to death only weeks after his return. Another veteran was also stabbed to death in Bogotá, and to bury him it was necessary to organize a collection among his neighbors. Ángel Fabio Goes, who had lost an eye and a hand in the war, was killed by three unidentified men who were never captured.

  I remember—as if it had happened yesterday—that I was writing the last installment of the series when the telephone on my desk rang, and I recognized the radiant voice of Martina Fonseca:

  “Hello?”

  I abandoned the article in the middle of the page because my heart was pounding, and I crossed the avenue to meet her at the Hotel Continental after twelve years without seeing her. From the door it was not easy to distinguish her among the other women who were having lunch in the crowded dining room, until she signaled me with her glove. She was dressed in her usual personal style, wearing a suede coat, a faded fox on her shoulder, and a hunter’s hat, and the years were beginning to be too noticeable in her wrinkled skin, mistreated by the sun, and her dimmed eyes, all of her diminished by the first signs of an unjust old age. We both must have realized that twelve years were a long time at her age, but we bore it well. I had tried to track her down when I first came to Barranquilla, until I learned that she was living in Panama, where her sailor was a pilot on the canal, yet it was not pride but timidity that kept me from bringing up the subject with her.

  I believe she had just eaten lunch with someone who had left her alone to wait for my visit. We had three fatal cups of coffee and together smoked half a pack of rough cigarettes, groping for a way to talk without speaking, until she dared to ask me if I ever thought about her. Only then did I tell her the truth: I had never forgotten her, but her goodbye had been so brutal that it changed my way of being. She was more compassionate than I:

  “I never forget that you’re like a son to me.”

  She had read my newspaper articles, my stories, and my only novel, and she talked about them to me with a lucid and merciless perspicacity possible only through love or spite. Yet I did nothing but elude the traps of nostalgia with the meanspirited cowardice that only men are capable of. When at last I managed to ease my tension, I dared to ask if she had given birth to the child she wanted.

  “He was born,” she said with joy, “and is finishing primary school.”

  “Black like his father?” I asked her with the pettiness that goes with jealousy.

  She called on her usual good sense. “White like his mother,” she said. “But his papá didn’t leave as I feared but grew even closer to me.” And in the face of my evident confusion she confirmed with a lethal smile:

  “Don’t worry: the boy is his. As well as two daughters as much alike as if they were only one.”

  She was happy she had come, she entertained me with some memories that had nothing to do with me, and I was vain enough to think she was hoping for a more intimate response from me. But like all men, I also mistook the time and place. She looked at her watch when I ordered the fourth coffee and another pack of cigarettes, and stood without preamble.

  “Well, baby, I’m happy to have seen you,” she said. And she concluded: “I couldn’t stand it anymore, having read you so much without knowing what you’re like.”

  “And what am I like?” I dared to ask.

  “Ah, no!” She laughed with all her heart. “That’s something you’ll never know!”

  Only when I caught my breath in front of the typewriter did I become aware of the longing to see her that I had always had, and the terror that kept me from staying with her for the rest of our lives. The same desolate terror I felt many times after that day whenever the phone rang.

  The new year of 1955 began for journalists on February 28, with the news that eight sailors on the destroyer Caldas of the Armada Nacional had fallen into the sea and disappeared during a storm when they were less than two hours from Cartagena. They had sailed four days earlier from Mobile, Alabama, after spending several months there for a mandated repair.

  While the entire newsroom was listening in suspense to the first radio bulletin about the disaster, Guillermo Cano had turned toward me in his swivel chair and kept his eye on me, an order ready on the tip of his tongue. José Salgar, on his way to the printing plant, also stopped in front of me, his nerves well tempered by the news. I had returned an hour earlier from Barranquilla, where I prepared a report on the eternal drama of Bocas de Ceniza, and now I was beginning to wonder when the next plane to the coast would leave so that I could write the first story about the eight men lost at sea. But it was soon made clear in the radio bulletin that the destroyer would reach Ca
rtagena at three in the afternoon, with no further news, for they had not recovered the bodies of the eight drowned sailors. Guillermo Cano exhaled.

  “What the hell, Gabo,” he said. “Our scoop drowned.”

  The disaster was reduced to a series of official bulletins, and information was handled with the honors required for those fallen in the line of duty, but nothing more. Toward the end of the week, however, the navy revealed that one of the men, Luis Alejandro Velasco, had reached a beach in Urabá in a state of exhaustion, suffering from exposure but certain to recover after floating for ten days on a raft without oars and nothing to eat or drink. We all agreed it would be the story of the year if we could manage to be alone with him for even half an hour.

  It was not possible. The navy kept him incommunicado while he recovered at the naval hospital in Cartagena. An astute reporter from El Tiempo, Antonio Montaña, sneaked into the hospital disguised as a doctor and was there with him for a few brief minutes. To judge by the results, however, all he obtained from the shipwrecked sailor were some pencil sketches of his position on the ship when he was swept overboard by the storm, and some incoherent statements that made it clear he had orders not to tell the story. “If I had known he was a reporter I would have helped him,” Velasco declared a few days later. Once he had recovered, and was under the protection of the navy, he gave an interview to the correspondent for El Espectador in Cartagena, Lácides Orozco, who could not go as far as we would have liked in order to find out how it was that a gust of wind could cause a disaster with seven men dead.

  Luis Alejandro Velasco, in fact, was subjected to an ironclad commitment that prevented him from moving around or expressing himself freely even after he was transferred to his parents’ house in Bogotá. Any technical or political question was resolved for us with cordial skill by a frigate lieutenant, Guillermo Fonseca, but with equal elegance he avoided essential facts regarding the only thing that interested us then, which was the truth about the adventure. In order to gain time, I wrote a series of background pieces on the return of the shipwrecked sailor to his parents’ house, and his uniformed chaperones again kept me from talking to him but authorized a mindless interview on a local radio station. It became evident that we were in the hands of masters of the official art of letting the news grow cold, and for the first time I was shaken by the idea that they were hiding something very serious about the catastrophe from the public. More than a suspicion, today I remember it as a premonition.

  It was a March of icy winds, and the dusty drizzle increased the burden of my regrets. Before facing the newsroom when I was overwhelmed by defeat, I took refuge in the nearby Hotel Continental and ordered a double at the deserted bar. I was drinking it in slow sips, not even taking off my heavy ministerial overcoat, when I heard a very sweet voice almost in my ear:

  “The man who drinks alone dies alone.”

  “From your lips to God’s ear, beautiful,” I answered with my heart in my mouth, convinced it was Martina Fonseca.

  The voice left a trail of summery gardenias in the air, but it was not Martina. I watched her go out the revolving door and disappear, with her unforgettable yellow umbrella, on the avenue stained by the drizzle. After a second drink I crossed the avenue, too, and reached the newsroom, sustained by the first two drinks. Guillermo Cano saw me come in and let out a happy shout for everyone:

  “Let’s see what story the great Gabo has brought us!”

  I answered with the truth:

  “Nothing but a dead fish.”

  I realized then that the pitiless mockers in the newsroom had begun to like me when they saw me pass by in silence, dragging my dripping wet overcoat, and none had the heart to begin the ritual gibes.

  Luis Alejandro Velasco continued enjoying his repressed glory. His mentors not only permitted but sponsored all kinds of publicity perversions. He received five hundred dollars and a new watch to say the truth on the radio that his timepiece had withstood the rigors of the weather. The factory that made his tennis shoes paid him a thousand dollars to say that his were so sturdy he had not been able to pull them apart in order to have something to chew. In a single day he gave a patriotic speech, let himself be kissed by a beauty queen, and was shown to the orphans as an example of patriotic morality. I was beginning to forget him on the memorable day when Guillermo Cano announced to me that he had him in his office, prepared to sign a contract to recount his complete adventure. I felt humiliated.

  “It’s not a dead fish anymore, it’s a rotten one,” I insisted.

  For the first and only time I refused to do for the paper what it was my obligation to do. Guillermo Cano resigned himself to the reality and sent away the shipwrecked sailor with no explanations. Later he told me that after saying goodbye to him in his office, he began to reflect and could not explain to himself what he had just done. Then he ordered the porter to bring the shipwrecked sailor back, and he called me on the phone with the unappealable notification that he had bought the exclusive rights to the complete story.

  It was not the first time and would not be the last that Guillermo would become obstinate about a lost case and in the end be proved correct. I informed him, depressed but in the best possible style, that I would write the article out of obedience as his employee but would not put my name to it. Without having thought about it first, this was a fortuitous but on-target determination regarding the story, for it obliged me to tell it in the first-person voice of the protagonist, in his own style and with his own ideas, and sign it with his name. And so I protected myself against any other shipwreck on dry land. In other words, it would be the internal monologue of a solitary adventure, just as it had happened and just as life had made it. The decision was miraculous, because Velasco turned out to be an intelligent man, with an unforgettable sensibility and courtesy, and a sense of humor at the right time and in the right place. And to our good fortune, all of it was subject to a character without flaws.

  The interview was long and thorough and took three exhausting weeks, and I did it knowing it was not for publishing raw but needed to be cooked in another pot: a feature article. I began with some bad faith, trying to have the shipwrecked sailor fall into contradictions in order to reveal his hidden truths, but soon I was certain he had none. I did not have to force anything. It was like strolling through a meadow of flowers with the supreme freedom to choose the ones I preferred. Velasco would come to my desk in the newsroom at three o’clock sharp, we would go over the previous day’s notes, and then proceed in a straight line. At night I would write each installment that he recounted, and it was published the following afternoon. It would have been easier and surer to write the complete adventure first and publish it revised, with all the details verified in a meticulous way. But there was no time. The topic was losing immediacy with every passing minute, and another sensational news item could topple it.

  We did not use a tape recorder. They had just been invented and the best ones were as large and heavy as a typewriter, and the magnetic tape would tangle like angel-hair candy. Transcription alone was a great feat. Even today we know that recorders are very useful for remembering, but the face of the person interviewed must never be neglected, for it can say much more than the voice, and at times just the opposite. I had to settle for the routine method of notes in school copybooks, but thanks to this I believe I did not miss a word or nuance of the conversation and was better able to explore in a profound way as we went along. The first two days were difficult, because the shipwrecked sailor wanted to tell everything all at once. But he soon learned, through the order and extent of my questions, and above all through his own narrative instinct and innate ability to understand the carpentry of the work.

  In order to prepare readers before throwing them into the water, we decided to begin the account with the sailor’s final days in Mobile. We also agreed not to end it at the moment he set foot on dry land but when he arrived in Cartagena cheered by the crowds, the point at which readers could follow the narrative thre
ad on their own with facts that had already been published. This gave us fourteen installments to maintain suspense over a period of two weeks.

  The first installment was published on April 5, 1955. That edition of El Espectador, preceded by advertisements on the radio, sold out in a few hours. The explosive crux of the matter was suggested on the third day, when we decided to disclose the real reason for the disaster, which according to the official version had been a storm. Searching for greater precision, I asked Velasco to tell about the storm in all its detail. By now he was so familiar with our common method that I could see a flash of roguishness in his eyes before he answered:

  “The problem is there was no storm.”

  What happened—he specified—was some twenty hours of strong winds, typical of the region at that time of year, which had not been foreseen by those in charge of the voyage. The crew had been paid back wages before weighing anchor, and they spent it at the last minute on all kinds of domestic appliances to take home, something so unexpected that no one seemed alarmed when they ran out of space in the interior of the ship and secured the largest cartons on deck: refrigerators, washing machines, stoves. The kind of cargo prohibited on a warship, and in such quantity that it took up vital space on the deck. Perhaps it was thought that an unofficial voyage of less than four days’ duration, with excellent weather forecasts, did not need to be treated with undue rigor. How many times had they made others like it, and how many more would they make without anything happening? The unlucky thing for everybody was that winds not much stronger than those predicted convulsed the sea under a splendid sun, made the vessel list much more than expected, and broke the lines holding a cargo loaded in a careless way. If it had not been a ship as seaworthy as the Caldas, it would have gone down without fail, but eight sailors standing guard on the deck fell overboard. And so the primary cause of the accident was not a storm, as official sources had insisted since the beginning, but what Velasco stated in his account: an overload of domestic appliances stowed improperly on the deck of a warship.