The house was in a good location in the district of La Popa, in the shadow of the historic convent that always has seemed on the verge of falling over a precipice. The four bedrooms and two bathrooms on the ground floor were reserved for the parents and their eleven children, ranging from me, the oldest, almost twenty-six years old, to Eligio, the youngest, who was five. All of them well brought up in the Caribbean culture of hammocks and straw mats on the floor and beds for as many as could fit in.
On the upper floor lived Uncle Hermogenes Sol, my father's brother, and Carlos Martinez Simahan, his son. The entire house was not large enough for so many people, but the rent was lowered because of my uncle's business dealings with the owner, about whom we knew only that she was very rich and was called La Pepa. The family, with its implacable gift for making jokes, did not take long to find the perfect address in the style of a popular tune: "The house of La Pepa at the foot of La Popa."
The arrival of the offspring is a mysterious recollection for me. The electricity had gone out in half the city, and we were trying to prepare the house in the dark so that the children could go to sleep. We older children recognized one another by our voices, but the younger ones had changed so much since my last visit that their enormous sad eyes frightened me in the light of the candles. I endured the disorder of trunks, bundles, and hammocks hanging in the dark as a domestic April 9. But what made the deepest impression on me was trying to move a shapeless sack that kept slipping out of my hands. It contained the remains of my grandmother Tranquilina, which my mother had disinterred and taken along in order to place them in the ossuary of San Pedro Claver; the remains of my father and my aunt, Elvira Carrillo, are in the same crypt.
My uncle Hermogenes Sol was the providential man in that emergency. He had been appointed general secretary of the Departmental Police in Cartagena, and his first radical action was to open a bureaucratic breach to save the family. Including me, with my misguided politics and a reputation for being a Communist that I had earned not for my ideology but because of how I dressed. There were jobs for everyone. They gave an administrative position without political responsibility to Papa. My brother Luis Enrique was named a detective, and they gave me a sinecure in the offices of the National Census, which the Conservative government insisted on carrying out, perhaps in order to have some idea of how many of its adversaries were still alive. The moral cost of the job was more dangerous for me than the political cost, because I collected my salary every two weeks and could not let myself be seen in the area for the rest of the month in order to avoid questions. The official explanation, not only for me but for more than a hundred other employees, was that I was on assignment outside the city.
The Cafe Moka, across the street from the census offices, was always crowded with false bureaucrats from neighboring towns who came only to collect their money. There was not a centimo for my personal use during the time I signed for my wages, because my salary was substantial but all of it went for household expenses. In the meantime, Papa had tried to matriculate me in the faculty of law and collided with the truth I had hidden from him. The mere fact that he knew it made me as happy as if I had received my diploma. My happiness was even more warranted because in the midst of so many setbacks and difficulties, I at last had found the time and space to finish my novel.
When I walked into El Universal they made me feel as if I were coming home. It was six in the evening, the busiest time, and the abrupt silence that my entrance caused at the linotypes and typewriters brought a lump to my throat. Not a minute had gone by for the Indian hair of Maestro Zabala. As if I had never left, he asked me to please write an editorial piece for him that had been delayed. An adolescent novice was using my typewriter, and he fell in his reckless haste to give up his seat to me. The first thing that surprised me was how difficult it was to write an anonymous note with editorial circumspection after some two years of the excesses of "La Jirafa." I had a page of copy when the publisher Lopez Escauriaza came over to say hello. His British impassivity was a commonplace in tertulias with friends and political caricatures, and I was touched by his flush of joy when he greeted me with a hug. When I finished the editorial, Zabala was waiting with a slip of paper on which the publisher had offered me a salary of one hundred twenty pesos a month for writing editorials. I was so impressed by the sum, unusual for that time and place, that I did not even give an answer or say thank you but sat down to write two more, intoxicated by the sensation that in reality the Earth did revolve around the Sun.
It was as if I had come back to my origins. The same topics corrected in liberal red by Maestro Zabala, then abbreviated by the same censorship of a censor already defeated by the impious tricks of the newsroom, the same midnights with steak topped by a fried egg and fried plantains at La Cueva, and the same topic of changing the world that went on until dawn on the Paseo de los Martires. Rojas Herazo had spent a year selling paintings so that he could move anywhere else, until he married Rosa Isabel, la Grande, and moved to Bogota. At the end of the night I sat down to write "La Jirafa," which I sent to El Heraldo, by the only modern means available at the time, which was ordinary mail, and I missed very few times, always through force majeure, until the debt was paid.
Life with my entire family, in difficult circumstances, lies in the domain not of memory but imagination. My parents slept in a bedroom on the ground floor with some of the younger children. My four sisters felt they had the right to a bedroom of their own. Hernando and Alfredo Ricardo slept in the third, under the care of Jaime, who kept them in a state of alert with his philosophical and mathematical preaching. Rita, who was fourteen, studied until midnight at the street door, in the light of the streetlamp, in order to save electricity in the house. She memorized her lessons by singing them aloud with the grace and good diction that she still has. Many strange moments in my books come from her reading exercises, with the mule that goes to the mill, and the child who chases the chocolate chicken, and the seer who sees the seesaw.* The house was livelier and above all more human after midnight, between going to the kitchen for a drink of water, or to the toilet for liquid or solid emergencies, or hanging crisscrossed hammocks at different levels in the hallways. I slept on the second floor with Gustavo and Luis Enrique--when my uncle and his son moved into their family house--and later with Jaime, who was subjected to the penance of not pontificating about anything after nine o'clock. One night we were kept awake for several hours by the cyclical bleating of an orphaned lamb. Gustavo said in exasperation:
"It sounds like a lighthouse."
I never forgot it, because at the time it was the kind of simile I caught on the fly in real life for the imminent novel.
It was the liveliest of several houses in Cartagena, which became more and more humble as the family's resources diminished. Looking for cheaper neighborhoods, we came down in class until we reached the house in Toril, where the ghost of a woman would appear at night. I was lucky enough not to have been there, but the accounts of my parents and brothers and sisters caused me as much terror as if I had. On the first night my parents were dozing on the sofa in the living room, and they saw the apparition as she passed from one bedroom to another, not looking at them, wearing a dress with little red flowers, her short hair fastened behind her ears with red ribbons. My mother described her down to the print on her dress and the style of her shoes. Papa denied having seen her in order not to further upset his wife or frighten the children, but the familiarity with which the apparition moved through the house starting at dusk did not permit anyone to ignore her. My sister Margot once woke before dawn and saw her on the rail of her bed, scrutinizing her with an intense gaze. But what affected her most was the terror of being seen from the next life.
On Sunday, coming out of Mass, a neighbor confirmed for my mother that no one had lived in that house for many years because of the boldness of the phantom, who once appeared in the dining room in the middle of the day while the family was eating lunch. The next day my mother went out w
ith two of the youngest children to look for a house to move into, and she found one in four hours. But it was difficult for most of my brothers and sisters to exorcise the idea that the ghost of the dead woman had moved along with them.
In the house at the foot of La Popa, in spite of all the time I had at my disposal, I took so much joy in writing that the days seemed too short. Ramiro de la Espriella reappeared with his degree of doctor of laws, more political than ever and enthusiastic about his readings of recent novels. Above all Skin, by Curzio Malaparte, which that year had become a key book for my generation. The effectiveness of its prose, the vigor of its intelligence, and the truculent conception of contemporary history kept us trapped until dawn. But time showed us that Malaparte was destined to be a useful example of virtues other than the ones I desired, and in the end they overthrew his image. Just the opposite of what happened to us almost at the same time with Albert Camus.
The De la Espriellas lived close to us at the time, and they had a family wine cellar that they looted in innocent bottles and brought to our house. Disregarding the advice of Don Ramon Vinyes, I would read long selections from my rough drafts to them and my brothers and sisters, just as they were, with the rubbish still not cleared away, and on the same strips of newsprint where I wrote everything during my sleepless nights at El Universal.
At this time Alvaro Mutis and Gonzalo Mallarino returned, but I had the fortunate modesty not to ask them to read the unfinished rough draft that still had no title. I wanted to lock myself away and without interruption make the first copy on standard paper before the final correction. I had some forty pages more than the version I had anticipated, but I still did not know that this could be a serious obstacle. I soon learned that it was: I am slave to a perfectionist exactitude that forces me to make a preliminary calculation of the length of a book, with the exact number of pages in each chapter and in the book as a whole. A single notable mistake in these calculations would oblige me to reconsider everything, because even a typing error disturbs me as much as a creative one. I thought this absolutist method was due to a heightened sense of responsibility, but today I know it was simple terror, pure and physical.
On the other hand, once again not heeding Don Ramon Vinyes, I sent the complete first draft to Gustavo Ibarra when I considered it finished, though it still did not have a title. Two days later he invited me to his house. I found him in a reed rocking chair on the terrace facing the sea, tanned and relaxed in beach attire, and I was moved by the tenderness with which he caressed my pages as he talked to me. A true teacher, who did not deliver a lecture on the book or tell me if he thought it was good or bad, but who made me aware of his ethical values. When he finished he observed me with satisfaction and concluded with his everyday simplicity:
"This is the myth of Antigone."
From my expression he realized that I did not understand, and he took the book by Sophocles down from his shelves and read to me what he meant. The dramatic situation in my novel was in essence the same as Antigone's, condemned to leaving the body of her brother Polynices unburied by order of King Creon, their uncle. I had read Oedipus in Colonus in the volume that Gustavo himself had given to me in the days when we first met, but I did not recall the myth of Antigone well enough to reconstruct it from memory within the drama of the banana zone, and I had not noticed their emotional affinities until then. I felt my soul stirred by happiness and disillusionment. That night I read the work again, with a strange mixture of pride at having coincided in good faith with so great a writer, and sorrow at the public embarrassment of plagiarism. After a week of dark crisis I decided to make some fundamental changes that would rescue my good faith, still not realizing the superhuman vanity of modifying a book of mine so that it would not resemble one by Sophocles. At last--resigned--I felt I had the moral right to use a sentence of his as a reverential epigraph, which I did.
The move to Cartagena saved us in time from the serious and dangerous deterioration in Sucre, but most of our calculations were illusory, as much for the meagerness of our income as for the size of the family. My mother used to say that the children of the poor eat more and grow faster than those of the rich, and the example of her own house was sufficient proof of this. All of our salaries would not have been enough for us to live without sudden alarms.
Time took care of the rest. Jaime, by means of another family scheme, became a civil engineer, the only one in a family that valued a degree as if it were an aristocratic title. Luis Enrique was a teacher of accounting, and Gustavo graduated as a topographer, and both continued to be the same guitarists and singers of other people's serenades. Yiyo surprised us from a very early age with a well-defined literary vocation and a strong character, of which he had given us an early demonstration at the age of five when he was caught trying to set fire to a closet full of clothes in the hope of seeing firefighters putting out the blaze inside the house. Later, when he and his brother Cuqui were invited by older fellow students to smoke marijuana, Yiyo was frightened and refused. Cuqui, on the other hand, who was always curious and reckless, inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. Years later, shipwrecked in the quicksand of drugs, he told me that after that first trip he had said to himself: "Shit! I don't want to do anything else in my life but this." For the next forty years, with a passion that had no future, he did nothing but keep the promise to die of his convictions. At the age of fifty-two he fell from his artificial paradise and was struck down by a massive heart attack.
Nanchi--the most peaceable man in the world--stayed on in the army after his obligatory military service, excelled in all kinds of modern weaponry, participated in numerous war games, but never took part in any of our many chronic wars. He settled for being a firefighter when he left the army, but there too he never had occasion to put out a single fire in more than five years. But he did not feel frustrated, because of a sense of humor that made him famous in the family as a master of the instant joke, and allowed him to be happy because of the mere fact of being alive.
Yiyo, in the most difficult years of poverty, became a writer and journalist by sheer hard work, without ever having smoked or taken a drink too many in his life. His irresistible literary vocation and concealed creativity stood firm against adversity. He died at the age of fifty-four, almost not enough time to publish a book of more than six hundred pages of masterful research into the secret life of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which he had worked on for years without my knowing about it and without ever making a direct inquiry of me.
Rita, early in her adolescence, knew how to learn from other people's experience. When I returned to my parents' house after a long absence, I found her suffering the same purgatory that all the girls had suffered because of her love for a good-looking, serious, and decent dark-skinned man whose only incompatibility with her was a height of some fifty centimeters. That same night I found my father listening to the news on his hammock in the bedroom. I turned down the volume, sat on the bed facing him, and asked him with my right of primogeniture what was going on with Rita's boyfriend. He fired the answer at me that he no doubt had always anticipated.
"The only thing going on is that the guy's a thief."
Just what I expected.
"What kind of thief?" I asked him.
"A thief thief," he said, still not looking at me.
"But what has he stolen?" I asked him without mercy.
He still did not look at me.
"Well," he said at last with a sigh. "Not him, but he has a brother who's in jail for stealing."
"Then there's no problem," I said with easy imbecility, "because Rita doesn't want to marry him but the one who's not in jail."
He did not reply. His well-proven honesty had gone astray beginning with the first answer, because he also knew that the rumor about the imprisoned brother was not true. With no further arguments, he tried to cling to the myth of dignity.
"All right, but they should marry right away, because I don't want long engagements in this house."
/> My reply was immediate and had a lack of charity that I have never forgiven myself for:
"Tomorrow, first thing."
"Man! There's no need to exaggerate!" Papa replied, startled but smiling his earlier smile. "That girl doesn't even have anything to wear yet."
The last time I saw Aunt Pa, when she was almost ninety years old, was on an afternoon when the heat was hideous and she arrived unannounced in Cartagena. She had traveled from Riohacha in an express taxi, carrying a student's schoolbag and wearing strict mourning and a black cloth turban. She entered the house happy, her arms spread wide, and shouted to everyone:
"I've come to say goodbye because I'm going to die now."
We took her in not only because she was who she was, but because we knew to what extent she understood her dealings with death. She stayed in the house, waiting for her time in the little maid's room, the only one she would agree to sleep in, and there she died in the odor of chastity at an age that we calculated to be a hundred and one years old.
That period was the most intense at El Universal. Zabala guided me with his political knowledge so that my pieces would say what they had to and not collide with the censor's pencil, and for the first time he was interested in my old idea of writing feature articles for the paper. A dreadful subject soon arose when tourists were attacked by sharks on the beaches of Marbella. But the most original idea that occurred to the municipality was to offer fifty pesos for each dead shark, and on the following day there were not enough branches on the almond trees to display the ones captured during the night. Hector Rojas Herazo, collapsing with laughter, wrote from Bogota in his new column in El Tiempo a mocking note about the blunder of applying to the shark hunt the timeworn method of barking up the wrong tree. This gave me the idea of writing an article about the nocturnal hunt. Zabala supported me with enthusiasm, but my failure began from the moment I set foot on the boat and they asked me if I got seasick and I answered no; if I was afraid of the ocean and the truth was yes but again I said no; and the last question was if I knew how to swim--it should have been the first--and I did not dare tell the lie that I did. In any event, on solid ground and in a conversation with sailors, I learned that the hunters went to Bocas de Ceniza, eighty-nine nautical miles from Cartagena, and returned loaded down with innocent sharks to sell as criminals at fifty pesos each. The big news ended that same day, and my hope for the article ended too. In its place I published story number eight: "Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait." At least two serious critics and my uncompromising friends in Barranquilla judged it a good change of direction.