Living to Tell the Tale

  He was the headmaster. His name was Juan Ventura Casalins and I remember him as a friend of my childhood, with nothing of the fearsome image that people had of teachers at the time. His unforgettable virtue was treating all of us as equal adults, though I still think he paid particular attention to me. In classes he would ask me more questions than he did the others, and he helped me so that my answers would be accurate and fluid. He allowed me to take books from the school library to read at home. Two of them, Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, were my happiness drug during those rocky years. I devoured them letter by letter, longing to know what happened in the next line and at the same time longing not to know in order not to break the spell. With them, as with The Thousand and One Nights, I learned and never forgot that we should read only those books that force us to reread them.

  On the other hand, my reading of Don Quixote always deserved a separate chapter, because it did not cause the upheaval in me foreseen by Maestro Casalins. The long learned speeches of the knight errant bored me, I did not find the stupidities of the squire at all amusing, and I even began to think it was not the same book that people talked so much about. But I told myself that a teacher as learned as ours could not be mistaken, and I forced myself to swallow it like spoonfuls of a purgative. I made other attempts in secondary school, where I was obliged to study it as a requirement, and I had an irremediable aversion to it until a friend advised me to put it on the back of the toilet and try to read it while I took care of my daily needs. Only in this way did I discover it, like a conflagration, and relish it forward and back until I could recite entire episodes by heart.

  That providential school also left me historic memories of an irretrievable city and time. It was the only building at the top of a green hill, and from its terrace the two ends of the world were visible. To the left, the Prado, the most distinguished and expensive district, which at first sight seemed a faithful copy of the electrified henhouse of the United Fruit Company. This was not a coincidence: a firm of American urban planners was building it with their imported tastes and norms and prices, and it was an infallible tourist attraction for the rest of the country. To the right, on the other hand, was the slum of our Barrio Abajo, with its streets of burning dust and houses of cane and mud with palm roofs, always reminding us that we were nothing more than flesh-and-blood mortals. It was our good fortune that from the terrace of the school we had a panoramic vision of the future: the historic delta of the Magdalena River, which is one of the great rivers of the world, and the gray ocean of Bocas de Ceniza.

  On May 28, 1935, we saw the oil tanker Taralite, flying a Canadian flag and under the command of Captain D. F. McDonald, which entered along the canals cut out of rock to roars of jubilation and dropped anchor in the port of the city to the noise of music and fireworks. This was the culmination of a great civic achievement that had cost many years and many pesos and had converted Barranquilla into the only sea-and-river port in the country.

  Not long afterward, a plane piloted by Captain Nicolas Reyes Manotas skimmed over the rooftops in search of a clear space for an emergency landing, to save not only his own skin but that of the souls he might hit in his fall. He was one of the pioneers of Colombian aviation. The primitive airplane had been given to him as a gift in Mexico, and he flew it solo from one end of Central America to the other. The crowd gathered at the airport in Barranquilla had prepared a triumphant welcome for him with handkerchiefs and flags and a band, but Reyes Manotas wanted to fly over the city another two times as a greeting, and his engine failed. He managed to recover with miraculous skill and land on the roof of a building in the business center, but the plane was caught in electric cables and was dangling from a post. My brother Luis Enrique and I followed him in a tumultuous crowd as far as we could, but we managed to see the pilot only after they got him out with great difficulty, though he was safe and sound and had a hero's ovation.

  The city also had its first radio station, a modern aqueduct that became a touristic and pedagogical attraction for displaying the new process of water purification, and a fire department whose sirens and bells were a fiesta for children and adults from the first moment they were heard. At about the same time the first convertible automobiles came in, racing along the streets at lunatic velocities and smashing into smithereens on the new paved highways. The undertaking establishment La Equitativa, inspired by the humor of death, set up an enormous sign at the exit from the city: "Take your time, we're waiting for you."

  At night, when there was no other refuge but the house, my mother would gather us together to read us Papa's letters. Most of them were masterpieces of distraction, but one was very explicit about the enthusiasm that homeopathy awakened in older people along the lower Magdalena. "There are cases here that would seem like miracles," my father said. At times he left us with the impression that very soon he would reveal something wonderful, but what followed was another month of silence. During Holy Week, when two of my younger brothers contracted pernicious cases of chicken pox, we had no way to communicate with him because not even the most expert scouts could pick up his trail.

  It was during those months that I understood in real life one of the words used most by my grandparents: poverty. I interpreted it as the situation we experienced in their house when the banana company began to be dismantled. They were always complaining about it. There were no longer two or even three shifts at the table, as there once had been, but only one. In order not to renounce the sacred ritual of lunches, even when they no longer had the resources to maintain them, they began to buy food prepared at the stands in the market, which was good and much cheaper and had the added surprise that we children liked it better. But the lunches ended forever when Mina learned that some frequent guests had resolved not to return to the house because the food was not as good as it once had been.

  The poverty of my parents in Barranquilla, on the contrary, was exhausting, but it allowed me the good fortune of establishing an exceptional relationship with my mother. More than the expected filial love, I felt an astounding admiration for her because she had the character of a lioness, silent but fierce when faced with adversity, and a relationship with God that seemed more combative than submissive: two exemplary virtues that imbued her life with a confidence that never failed. At the worst moments she would laugh at her own providential resources. Like the time she bought an ox knee and boiled it day after day for our increasingly watery daily broth until it had no more to give. One night during a terrifying storm she used up the month's supply of lard to make rag candles, because the electricity was off until dawn and she herself had inculcated a fear of the dark in the younger ones to keep them from leaving their beds.

  At first my parents visited families they knew who had emigrated from Aracataca because of the banana crisis and the decline of public order. They were circular visits that always revolved around the topic of the misfortunes that had raged through the town. But when poverty squeezed us in Barranquilla we did not complain again in anyone else's house. My mother reduced her reticence to a single phrase: "You can see poverty in the eyes."

  Until I was five, death had been for me a natural end that happened to other people. The delights of heaven and the torments of hell seemed only lessons to be memorized in Father Astete's catechism class. They had nothing to do with me, until I learned in passing at a wake that lice were escaping from the hair of the dead man and wandering along the pillows. What disturbed me after that was not the fear of death but embarrassment that lice would escape my head too in the presence of all my relatives at my wake. But in primary school in Barranquilla, I did not realize I was crawling with lice until I had infected the entire family. Then my mother gave yet another proof of her character. She disinfected her children one by one with insecticide for cockroaches, in thorough cleansings that she baptized with a name of noble lineage: the police. The problem was that no sooner were we clean than we began to crawl again, because I became reinfected at school. Then my mother de
cided to use drastic remedies and she forced me to have my head shaved. It was an act of heroism to appear at school on Monday wearing a cloth cap, but I survived the mockery of my classmates with honor and completed the final year with the highest grades. I never saw Maestro Casalins again, but my eternal gratitude remained.

  A friend of my papa's whom we never met got me a vacation job at a printing shop near the house. The salary was just a little more than nothing, and my only incentive was the idea of learning the trade. But I did not have a minute to look at the press because my work, in another section, consisted of arranging lithographed plates for binding. A consolation was that my mother authorized me to use my salary to buy the Sunday supplement of La Prensa that had the comic strips of Tarzan, Buck Rogers, called Rogelio el Conquistador, and Mutt and Jeff, called Benitin y Eneas. During my leisure time on Sundays I learned to draw them from memory and would continue the week's episodes on my own. I managed to waken the enthusiasm of some adults on the block and sold them for as much as two centavos.

  The job was tiring and sterile, and no matter how many pains I took, the reports of my superiors accused me of a lack of enthusiasm in my work. It must have been out of consideration for my family that they relieved me of the routine of the shop and made me a street distributor of illustrated advertisements for a cough syrup recommended by the most famous movie stars. That seemed fine to me because the fliers were attractive with full-color photographs of the actors on glossy paper. From the beginning, however, I realized that handing them out was not as easy as I thought, since people viewed them with suspicion because they were being given away, and most contorted and twitched as if they had been electrified in order not to accept them. On the first few days I went back to the shop with what I had left over so that they would make up the amount I had distributed. Until I ran into some school friends from Aracataca, whose mother was horrified to see me doing what she considered work for beggars. She was almost shouting when she berated me for walking around the street in cloth sandals that my mother had bought so I would not wear out my full-dress half boots.

  "You tell Luisa Marquez," she said, "to think about what her parents would say if they saw their favorite grandchild in the market handing out advertisements for consumptives."

  I did not give my mother the message in order to spare her the grief, but I cried into my pillow with rage and shame for several nights. The end of the drama was that I did not hand out fliers again but tossed them into the gutters in the market, not foreseeing that the water was gentle and the glossy papers stayed afloat until they formed a quilt of beautiful colors on the surface, a very unusual sight from the bridge.

  My mother must have received a message from her beloved dead in a revelatory dream, because in less than two months she took me out of the printing shop without any explanations. I resisted because I did not want to miss the Sunday edition of La Prensa that we received in the family like a blessing from heaven, but my mother continued buying it even when she had to put one less potato in the soup. Another means of salvation was the consolatory sum that Uncle Juanito sent to us during the harshest months. He still lived in Santa Marta on his scant earnings as a certified accountant, and he imposed upon himself the duty of sending us a letter every week with two one-peso bills inside. The captain of the launch Aurora, an old friend of the family, would give it to me at seven in the morning, and I would go home with basic foodstuffs for several days.

  One Wednesday I could not run the errand and my mother entrusted it to Luis Enrique, who could not resist the temptation of multiplying the two pesos in the slot machine in a Chinese tavern. He did not have the resolve to stop when he lost the first two slugs, and he kept trying to get them back until he was down to the last one. "I was in such a panic," he told me as an adult, "that I decided never to go home again." He knew very well that two pesos bought basic food for a week. By a stroke of luck, with the last slug something happened in the machine, it shuddered with the metal earthquake in its gut, and in an unstoppable stream it vomited up all the slugs for the two lost pesos. "Then the devil inspired me," Luis Enrique told me, "and I dared risk another slug." He won. He risked another and won, and another and another and he won. "The terror I felt then was worse than when I was losing, and my guts turned to water," he told me, "but I went on playing." In the end he won twice the original two pesos in five-centavo coins, and he did not dare exchange them for bills at the register for fear the Chinese owner would involve him in some deceit. They were so bulky in his pockets that before he gave Mama the two pesos from Uncle Juanito in five-centavo coins, he buried the four he had won at the back of the courtyard where he hid every stray centavo he found. Little by little he spent them without confessing the secret to anyone until many years later, in torment for having fallen into the temptation of risking his last five centavos in the Chinese shop.

  His relationship with money was very personal. Once when my mother caught him scratching at the money for the market in her purse, his defense was somewhat savage but lucid: the money one takes without permission from the purses of one's parents cannot be a theft because the money belongs to everybody in common and they deny it to us out of envy because they can not do with it what their children do. I defended his argument to the extreme of confessing that I, too, had sacked her domestic hiding places when the need was urgent. My mother lost her temper. "Don't be so stupid," she almost shouted at me. "You and your brother don't steal anything from me, because I leave the money where I know you'll find it when you're in trouble." In an attack of rage I once heard her murmur in despair that God ought to allow the theft of certain things in order to feed one's children.

  Luis Enrique's natural talent for mischief was very useful in solving mutual problems, but he never made me an accomplice in his misconduct. On the contrary, he always arranged matters so that not even the slightest suspicion would fall on me, which strengthened a true affection for him that has lasted my whole life. On the other hand, I never let him know how much I envied his audacity and suffered on account of the beatings Papa gave him. My behavior was very different from his, though at times it was hard for me to temper my envy. But I was troubled by Mama's parents' house in Cataca, where they took me to sleep only when they were going to give me purges for worms, or castor oil. To the point where I despised the twenty-centavo coins they paid me for the dignity with which I took them.

  I believe the height of my mother's desperation was sending me with a letter to a man who had a reputation for being the richest man and at the same time the most generous philanthropist in the city. Talk of his good heart was as widespread as news of his financial triumphs. My mother wrote him an anguished and direct letter to request urgent financial assistance, not in her name, because she was capable of enduring anything, but for love of her children. Only someone who knew her would understand what that humiliation meant in her life, but circumstances demanded it. She warned me that the secret had to remain between the two of us, and it did, until this moment when I am writing about it.

  I knocked at the large front door of the house, which somehow resembled a church, and almost without delay a small window opened and a woman looked out; all I remember about her was the ice in her eyes. She took the letter without saying a word and shut the window again. It must have been eleven in the morning, and I waited, sitting against the doorjamb, until three in the afternoon, when I decided to knock again and try to get an answer. The same woman opened the window, recognized me in surprise, and asked me to wait a moment. The answer was that I should come back at the same time on Tuesday of the following week. I did, but the only answer was that there would be no answer for another week. I had to go back three more times, always receiving the same answer, until a month and a half later, when a woman even harsher than the first responded, on behalf of her employer, that this was not a charitable establishment.

  I walked around the burning streets trying to find the courage to bring my mother an answer that would deliver her from her illusio
ns. It was already dark when I faced her with an aching heart and said that the good philanthropist had died several months earlier. What grieved me most was the rosary my mother said for the eternal rest of his soul.

  Four or five years later, when we heard the factual report on the radio that the philanthropist had died the day before, I was petrified as I waited for my mother's reaction. But I will never understand how it was that she heard it with sympathetic attention and said with a heartfelt sigh:

  "God keep him in His holy kingdom!"

  A block from the house we made friends with the Mosqueras, a family that spent fortunes on comic books and kept them piled to the ceiling in a shed in their courtyard. We were the only privileged beings who could spend entire days there reading Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers. Another fortunate discovery was an apprentice who painted movie posters for the nearby Las Quintas Theater. I helped him for the sheer pleasure of painting letters, and he got us in free two or three times a week for the good films with gun battles and fistfights. The only luxury that was missing was a radio so that we could listen to music at any time of day with just the touch of a button. Today it is difficult to imagine how rare they were in the houses of the poor. Luis Enrique and I would sit on a bench at the store on the corner where idle patrons could sit and chat, and we spent entire afternoons listening to the programs of popular music, which is what most of the programs were. In time we learned by heart a complete repertoire of Miguelito Valdes and the Casino de la Playa Orchestra, Daniel Santos and the Sonora Matancera, and the boleros of Agustin Lara in the voice of Tona la Negra. Our amusement at night, above all on the two occasions when they cut off our electricity for lack of payment, was to teach the songs to my mother and brothers and sisters, Ligia and Gustavo in particular, who learned them like parrots without understanding them and entertained us no end with their lyrical bits of nonsense. There were no exceptions. We all inherited from our father and mother a special memory for music and a good ear for learning a song the second time we heard it. Above all Luis Enrique, who was born a musician and specialized on his own in guitar solos for serenades of unrequited love. It did not take us long to discover that all the children without radios in the neighboring houses also learned the songs from my brothers and sisters, and most of all from my mother, who became one more sister in that house of children.