Papa arranged not to leave me alone at night in the pharmacy in Barranquilla, but his solutions were not always the most amusing for a boy of twelve. Visits at night to his friends' families were exhausting, because the ones that had children my age obliged them to go to bed at eight, leaving me tormented by boredom and sleepiness in a wasteland of social small talk. One night I must have fallen asleep during a visit to the family of a physician who was a friend of his, and I did not know how or at what time I woke walking down a strange street. I had no idea where I was, or how I had gotten there, and it could only be understood as an episode of sleepwalking. There was no precedent for it in the family, and it was never repeated again, but this is still the only possible explanation. The first thing that surprised me when I woke was the store window of a barber shop with gleaming mirrors where three or four patrons were being waited on under a clock that read ten after eight, which was an unthinkable hour for a boy my age to be alone on the street. Dazed with fright, I confused the names of the family we were visiting and could not remember their address, but some passersby were able to tie up the loose ends and take me to the right house. I found the neighborhood in a state of panic brought on by all kinds of conjectures regarding my disappearance. The only thing they knew about me was that I had gotten out of my chair in the middle of the conversation, and they thought I had gone to the bathroom. The sleepwalking explanation did not convince anyone, least of all my father, who without hesitation understood it as a piece of mischief that had not turned out well for me.
By a stroke of luck I was able to make amends some days later at another house, where he left me one night while he attended a business dinner. The entire family was interested only in a popular quiz show on the Atlantico radio station, and that night the question seemed unanswerable: "What animal changes its name when it rolls over?" By a strange miracle I had read the answer that very afternoon in the latest edition of the Almanaque Bristol and thought it was a bad joke: the only animal that changes its name is the escarabajo, because when it rolls over it turns into an escararriba.* I told this in secret to one of the girls in the house, and the oldest one rushed to the telephone and gave the answer to the Atlantico radio station. She won first prize, enough to pay the rent for three months: a hundred pesos. The living room filled with boisterous neighbors who had listened to the program and hurried to congratulate the winners, but what interested the family more than the money was the victory itself in a contest that had made radio history along the Caribbean coast. No one remembered I was there. When Papa came to pick me up, he joined the family celebration and drank a toast to their victory, but no one told him who the real winner had been.
Another victory at that time was my father's permission to go alone to the Sunday matinee at the Colombia Theater. For the first time they were showing serials, one episode each Sunday, and a tension was created that did not give you a moment's peace during the week. La invasion de Mongo was the first interplanetary epic, replaced in my heart only years later by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Argentine cinema, with the films of Carlos Gardel and Libertad Lamarque, defeated all the rest in the end.
In less than two months we finished setting up the pharmacy and rented and furnished the family's residence. The pharmacy was on a very active corner in the middle of the business center and only four blocks from the Paseo Bolivar. The residence, on the other hand, was on a marginal street in the impoverished and lively area known as Barrio Abajo, but the rent did not correspond to what it was but what it aspired to be: a Gothic manor house with gingerbread painted yellow and red, and two battle minarets.
On the same day that we acquired the site for the pharmacy, we hung our hammocks from the hooks in the back of the store and slept there, simmering in a soup of perspiration. When we occupied the residence we discovered there were no hooks for hammocks, but we laid the mattresses on the floor and slept as well as we could after we managed to borrow a cat to chase away the mice. When my mother arrived with the rest of the troops, the furnishings were still not complete and there were no kitchen utensils or many other things that we needed to live.
In spite of its artistic pretensions, the house was ordinary and not really big enough for us, with a living room, dining room, two bedrooms, and a small paved courtyard. The fact was it should not have cost a third of the rent we were paying. My mother was horrified when she saw it, but her husband reassured her with the lure of a golden future. They were always this way. It was impossible to conceive of two creatures so different who got along so well and loved each other so much.
My mother's appearance made an impression on me. She was pregnant for the seventh time, and it seemed to me that her eyelids and ankles were as swollen as her waist. She was thirty-three years old at the time, and this was the fifth house she had furnished. I was struck by her low state of mind that became worse after the first night, for she was terrified by the idea, which she herself invented with no foundation at all, that Madame X had lived there before she was knifed to death. The crime had been committed seven years earlier, the last time my parents had lived in Barranquilla, and it was so terrifying that my mother had proposed not living in the city again. Perhaps she had forgotten it when she returned this time, but it came back to her on the first night she spent in a gloomy house where, on the spot, she had detected a certain resemblance to Dracula's castle.
The first news about Madame X had been the discovery of her naked body made unrecognizable by its advanced state of decomposition. It was established with difficulty that she had been younger than thirty, with black hair and attractive features. It was believed that she had been buried alive because her left hand was over her eyes in a gesture of terror, and her right arm was raised above her head. The only possible clues to her identity were two blue ribbons and an ornamental comb in what might have been a braided hairdo. Among many hypotheses, the one that seemed most probable was that she was a French dancer of easy virtue who had disappeared after the possible date of the crime.
Barranquilla had the well-deserved reputation of being the most hospitable and peaceful city in the country, but it was afflicted with an atrocious crime each year. Still, there was no precedent for one that had shaken public opinion as much and for as long as the crime of the nameless knifing victim. La Prensa, one of the most important newspapers in the country at the time, was considered the pioneer in Sunday comic strips--Buck Rogers, Tarzan of the Apes--but from its earliest years it had made its mark as one of the great precursors in crime reporting. For several months it kept the city in suspense with large headlines and surprising revelations that, with reason or without it, made the now-forgotten reporter famous throughout the country.
The authorities tried to restrict his reports with the argument that they were interfering with the investigation, but readers believed the authorities less than the revelations in La Prensa. The confrontation kept readers fascinated, and on at least one occasion investigators were obliged to change direction. The image of Madame X was implanted so deeply in the popular imagination that in many houses the doors were locked with chains and special vigilance was maintained at night on the assumption that the murderer, who was still at large, would attempt to continue his program of atrocious crimes, and it was decided that adolescent girls should not leave their houses alone after six in the evening.
The truth, however, was not discovered by anyone but was revealed sometime later by the perpetrator of the crime, Efrain Duncan, who confessed to having killed his wife, Angela Hoyos, on the date calculated by the coroner's office, and burying her in the place where the stabbed body had been found. Family members recognized the blue ribbons and the comb that Angela wore when she left the house with her husband on April 5 for a supposed trip to Calamar. The case was closed in a conclusive way by a final, inconceivable coincidence that seemed to have been pulled out of his sleeve by an author of fantastic novels: Angela Hoyos had an identical twin sister, which permitted her to be identified beyond any doubt.
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The myth of Madame X degenerated into an ordinary crime of passion, but the mystery of her identical twin still floated through the houses because people began to think she was Madame X herself come back to life through the arts of witchcraft. Doors were closed with crossbars and blocked with ramparts of furniture to prevent the murderer from coming in at night, for he had escaped prison with the aid of magic. In wealthy neighborhoods, it became the fashion to have hunting dogs trained to attack murderers capable of walking through walls. In reality, my mother could not overcome her fear until the neighbors convinced her that the house in Barrio Abajo had not yet been built in the days of Madame X.
On July 10, 1939, my mother gave birth to a little girl with the beautiful profile of an Indian, who was baptized Rita on account of the inexhaustible devotion felt in the house for St. Rita of Casia, founded, among many other graces, on the patience with which she endured the wicked character of her wayward husband. My mother would tell us that he had returned home one night maddened by alcohol, a minute after a hen left her droppings on the dining-room table. Without time to clean the immaculate tablecloth, the wife managed to cover the waste with a plate so that her husband would not see it, and hastened to distract him with the obligatory question:
"What would you like to eat?"
The man growled:
"Shit."
Then his wife lifted the plate and said with saintly sweetness:
"Here you are."
The story says that the husband then became convinced of his wife's holiness and converted to the faith of Christ.
The new drugstore in Barranquilla was a spectacular failure, undiminished by the speed with which my father foresaw it. After several months of defending himself in bits and pieces, opening two holes in order to fill one, he revealed himself to be more erratic than he had seemed so far. One day he packed his knapsacks and went to seek the fortunes lying buried in the most unexpected towns along the Magdalena River. Before he left he took me to his associates and friends and informed them with a certain solemnity that in his absence I would be there. I never knew if he said it as a joke, as he liked to do even on solemn occasions, or if he said it in all seriousness, as he enjoyed doing on ordinary occasions. I suppose that each of them understood him in his own way, for at the age of twelve I was rachitic and pale and almost unfit for even drawing and singing. The woman who sold us milk on credit told my mother in front of everyone, including me, without a hint of malice:
"You'll forgive me for saying so, Senora, but I don't believe this boy will grow up."
For a long time afterward my fear left me expecting a sudden death, and I often dreamed that when I looked in the mirror I did not see myself but an unborn calf. The school doctor diagnosed me as suffering from malaria, tonsillitis, and black bile on account of my abuse of unguided readings. I did not try to relieve anyone's alarm. On the contrary, I would exaggerate my condition as an invalid to avoid chores. My father, however, paid no attention to science and before he left he proclaimed that I was responsible for the house and family during his absence:
"As if he were me."
On the day he left he gathered us together in the living room and gave us instructions and preventive reprimands for what we might not do well in his absence, but we realized they were stratagems to keep from crying. He gave each of us a five-centavo coin, which was a small fortune for any child in those days, and he promised to exchange each of them for two identical ones if they were still intact when he returned. Then he addressed me in an evangelical tone:
"I leave them in your hands, may I find them in your hands."
It broke my heart to see him leave the house in his riding gaiters with his knapsacks over his shoulder, and I was the first who gave in to tears when he looked at us for the last time before turning the corner and waved goodbye. Only then, and for the rest of my life, did I realize how much I loved him.
It was not difficult to carry out his charge to me. My mother was becoming accustomed to inopportune and uncertain times alone, and she managed them with reluctance, but with great facility. Cooking and keeping the house in order made it necessary for even the youngest children to help in domestic duties, which they did well. During this time I felt like an adult for the first time when I realized that my brothers and sisters had begun to treat me like an uncle.
I never could overcome my shyness. When I had to confront the raw responsibility our wandering father had left with us, I learned that shyness is an invincible phantom. Each time I had to ask for credit, even when it had been agreed to ahead of time in stores owned by friends, I put it off for hours in the vicinity of the house, repressing my desire to cry and the cramps in my stomach, until at last I dared to go in with my jaws clenched so tight I could not speak. There was always some heartless shopkeeper who would leave me in utter confusion: "You moronic kid, you can't talk with your mouth shut." More than once I returned home with empty hands and some excuse I had invented. But never again was I as wretched as the first time I tried to talk on the telephone in the store at the corner. The owner helped me with the operator, for automatic service did not exist yet. I felt the winds of death when he gave me the receiver. I was hoping for an obliging voice and what I heard was the barking of someone who spoke into the darkness at the same time I did. I thought my interlocutor could not understand me either and I raised my voice as loud as I could. In a fury, he raised his too:
"What the hell are you shouting at me for?"
I hung up, terrified. I must admit that despite my fever to communicate I still have to repress my fear of telephones and airplanes, and I do not know if it is something left over from those days. How did I ever do anything? It was my good fortune that Mama often repeated the answer: "You must suffer in order to serve."
Our first news of Papa came two weeks later in a letter intended more to entertain than to inform us about anything. My mother understood it in this way and she sang that day as she washed the dishes to raise our morale. Without my papa she was different: she identified with her daughters as if she were an older sister. She fit in with them so well that she was the best at their children's games, even dolls, and would lose her temper and fight with them as equals. Another two letters in the same vein as the first came from my papa, and they were filled with such promising projects that they helped us to sleep better.
A serious problem was the speed with which we outgrew our clothes. No one got hand-me-downs from Luis Enrique, it would not even have been possible because he would come home in miserable condition, his clothes ruined, and we never knew why. My mother said it was if he had walked through barbed wire. My sisters--seven and nine years old--helped each other with miracles of ingenuity, and I always have believed that the pressing needs of those days turned them into premature adults. Aida was resourceful and Margot had, for the most part, overcome her shyness and was affectionate and obliging with her newborn sister. I was the most difficult, not only because I had to perform distinctive tasks but because my mother, protected by everyone's enthusiasm, took the risk of reducing the household funds in order to matriculate me in the Cartagena de Indias School, a ten-block walk from the house.
In accordance with the notification we had received, some twenty applicants showed up at eight in the morning for the admissions procedure. To our good fortune it was not a written examination, but three teachers called us in the order we had enrolled the previous week and gave us a brief examination based on our certificates of previous study. I was the only one who did not have any, since there had not been time to request them from the Montessori and elementary schools in Aracataca, and my mother thought I would not be admitted without papers. But I decided to take a chance. One of the teachers removed me from the line when I confessed I did not have them, but another took charge of my fate and led me to his office to examine me without prerequisites. He asked me what quantity was a gross, how many years were in a lustrum and a millennium, he had me repeat the departmental capitals, the principal rivers
of the nation, and the countries that bordered it. Everything seemed routine until he asked me what books I had read. He found it noteworthy that at my age I cited so many and so great a variety of books, and had read The Thousand and One Nights in an adult edition that had not suppressed some of the scabrous episodes that scandalized Father Angarita. It surprised me to learn that it was an important book, for I always had thought that serious adults could not believe that genies came out of bottles or doors opened at the incantation of magic words. The applicants who had gone before me had taken no more than a quarter of an hour, and were admitted or rejected, but I spent more than half an hour conversing with the teacher about all kinds of subjects. Together we looked at a bookcase that stood behind his desk and was crowded with volumes, and there, distinguished by their number and splendor, was the series The Young Person's Treasury, which I had heard about, but the teacher convinced me that at my age, Don Quixote was more useful. He did not find it in his library but promised to lend it to me later. After half an hour of rapid commentaries on Sinbad the Sailor or Robinson Crusoe, he accompanied me to the exit without telling me if I had been admitted. I thought I had not been, of course, but on the terrace he shook my hand and said goodbye until Monday at eight in the morning, when I would matriculate in the most advanced course in the primary school: the fourth year.