Living to Tell the Tale (10 page)

Chon belonged to the servants and to the street. She had come from Barrancas with my grandparents when she was still a girl, had grown
up in the kitchen but was assimilated into the family, and had been treated like a chaperoning aunt ever since her pilgrimage to the Province with my infatuated mother. In her final years she moved to her own room in the poorest part of town, simply because she wanted to, and lived by selling on the street, starting at dawn, balls of ground corn for
arepas,
and her peddler’s cry became familiar
in the silence of the small hours: “Old Chon’s chilled dough …”

She had a beautiful Indian color and always seemed nothing but skin and bones, and she went barefoot, wearing a white turban
and wrapped in starched sheets. Her pace was very slow as she walked down the middle of the street with an escort of tamed, silent dogs who advanced as they circled around her. In the end she became part of
the town’s folklore. At a Carnival celebration someone appeared as Chon, with her sheets and her vendor’s cry, although they could not train a guard of dogs like hers. Her cry of “chilled dough” became so popular that it was the subject of an accordion players’ song. One ill-fated morning two wild dogs attacked hers, who defended themselves with so much ferocity that Chon fell to the ground with
a fractured spine. She did not survive despite the numerous medical resources my grandfather provided for her.

Another revealing memory from that time was when Matilde Armenta gave birth; she was a laundress who worked in the house when I was about six years old. I went into her room by mistake and found her naked and lying with her legs spread on a canvas bed, howling with pain, surrounded by
a disordered and irrational band of midwives who had divided up her body among themselves to help her give birth with tremendous shouts. One wiped the sweat from her face with a damp towel, others held down her arms and legs and massaged her belly to speed up the birth. Santos Villero, impassive in the midst of the disorder, murmured prayers for a calm sea with closed eyes as she seemed to dig between
the thighs of the woman in labor. The heat was unbearable in the room filled with steam from the pots of boiling water they had brought in from the kitchen. I stayed in a corner, torn between fear and curiosity, until the midwife pulled out by the ankles something raw like an unborn calf with a bloody length of intestine hanging from its navel. Then one of the women discovered me in the corner
and dragged me from the room.

“You’re in mortal sin,” she said. And ordered with a menacing finger: “Don’t think again about what you saw.”

On the other hand, the woman who in reality took away my innocence did not intend to and never knew she had. Her name was Trinidad, she was the daughter of someone who worked in the house, and one fatal spring she began to blossom. She was thirteen but still
used the dresses she had worn when she
was nine, and they were so tight to her body that she seemed more naked than if she had been undressed. One night we were alone in the courtyard, band music erupted without warning from the house next door, and Trinidad began to dance with me, and she held me so tight she took my breath away. I do not know what became of her, but even today I still wake up
in the middle of the night agitated by the upheaval, and I know I could recognize her in the dark by the touch of every inch of her skin and her animal odor. In an instant I became conscious of my body with a clarity of instincts that I have never felt again, and that I dare to recall as an exquisite death. After that I knew in a confused and illusory fashion that there was an unfathomable mystery
I did not know but that agitated me as if I did. The women of the family, however, always led me along the arid path of chastity.

The loss of innocence taught me at the same time that it was not Baby Jesus who brought us toys at Christmas, but I was careful not to say so. When I was ten, my father revealed this to me as a secret for adults because he assumed I already knew it, and he took me
to the stores on Christmas Eve to select toys for my brothers and sisters. The same thing had happened with the mystery of childbirth even before I witnessed Matilde Armenta: I choked with laughter when people said that a stork brought babies from Paris. But I should confess that neither then nor now have I succeeded in connecting childbirth with sex. In any case, I think my intimacy with the maids
could be the origin of a thread of secret communication that I believe I have with women and that throughout my life has allowed me to feel more comfortable and sure with them than with men. It may also be the source of my conviction that they are the ones who maintain the world while we men throw it into disarray with our historic brutality.

Sara Emilia Márquez, without knowing it, had something
to do with my destiny. Pursued from the time she was very young by suitors she did not even deign to notice, she decided, and for the rest of her life, on the first one who looked all right to her. The chosen one had something in common with my father, for he was a stranger who arrived, no one knew how or from where,
with a good background but no known resources. His name was José del Carmen Uribe
Vergel, but at times he signed only J. del C. Some time passed before anyone knew who he was in reality and where he came from, until it was learned from the speeches he was hired to write for public functionaries, and from the love poems he published in his own cultural magazine whose frequency depended on the will of God. From the time he appeared in the house, I felt a great admiration for
his fame as a writer, the first I had met in my life. On the spot I wanted to be like him and was not content until Aunt Mama learned to comb my hair like his.

I was the first one in the family who learned of their secret love, one night when he came into the house across the way where I was playing with friends. He called me aside, in a state of evident tension, and gave me a letter for Sara
Emilia. I knew she was sitting in the door of our house waiting for one of her friends to visit. I crossed the street, hid behind one of the almond trees, and threw the letter with so much precision that it fell into her lap. Frightened, she raised her hands, but the scream remained in her throat when she recognized the handwriting on the envelope. Sara Emilia and J. del C. were my friends from then
on.

Elvira Carrillo, the twin sister of my uncle Esteban, would twist and squeeze a stalk of cane with both hands and get out the juice with the strength of a sugar mill. She was better known for her brutal frankness than for the tenderness with which she treated children, above all my brother Luis Enrique, a year younger than I, for whom she was both sovereign and accomplice, and who gave her
the inscrutable name of Aunt Pa. Impossible problems were always her specialty. She and Esteban were the first to come to the house in Cataca, but while he found his path in all kinds of fruitful trades and businesses, she remained as an indispensable aunt in the family without ever realizing that she was. She would disappear when she was not needed, but when she was, no one ever knew where she
came from or how. In her bad moments she would talk to herself while she stirred the pot, and reveal in a loud voice the location of things that were thought to be lost. She stayed on in the house
after she had buried the older people, while weeds devoured the place little by little, and animals wandered the bedrooms, and she was disturbed after midnight by a cough from beyond the grave in the
next room.

Francisca Simodosea—Aunt Mama—the commander of the tribe, who died a virgin at the age of seventy-nine, differed from the others in her habits and language. For her culture was not from the Province but from the feudal paradise of the savannas of Bolívar, where her father, José María Mejía Vidal, had migrated from Riohacha with his silversmith’s skills when he was very young. She had
allowed her wiry dark hair, which resisted turning white until she was very old, to grow down to her knees. She would wash it with perfumed water once a week and sit to comb it in the doorway of her bedroom in a sacred ritual that took several hours, consuming without pause cigarettes made of harsh tobacco that she smoked backwards, with the lit end inside her mouth, as the Liberal troops did so
as not to be seen by the enemy in the dark of night. Her style of dress was different, too, with underskirts and bodices of immaculate linen, and velveteen mules.

As opposed to the uncorrupted purism of my grandmother, Mama’s language was the loosest popular slang. She did not hide it from anyone or under any circumstances, and she said what she thought to everyone’s face. Including a nun, one
of my mother’s teachers at the boarding school in Santa Marta, whom she stopped short because of a trivial impertinence: “You’re one of those women who doesn’t know her ass from a day of fasting.” But she always managed not to seem coarse or insulting.

For half her life she was the keeper of the keys to the cemetery, and she filled out and issued death certificates and made the hosts for Mass
at home. She was the only person in the family, of either sex, who did not seem to have a heart pierced by the sorrow of thwarted love. We became aware of that one night when the doctor was preparing to insert a catheter, and she stopped him with an argument I did not understand at the time: “I want you to know, Doctor, that I’ve never known a man.”

From then on I often heard her say this, yet
it never seemed boastful or regretful to me but like a simple fact that left no trace at all in her life. On the other hand, she was an artful matchmaker who must have suffered in her double game of acting as lookout for my parents without being disloyal to Mina.

I have the impression that she got along better with children than with adults. It was she who took care of Sara Emilia until she moved
alone into the room with the Calleja books. Then, to replace her, she sheltered me and my sister Margot, though my grandmother was still in charge of my personal cleanliness and my grandfather concerned himself with my formation as a man.

My most unsettling memory of those times is Aunt Petra, my grandfather’s older sister, who went to Riohacha to live with them when she lost her sight. She lived
in the room next to the office, where the workshop was later, and she developed a magical skill for moving around in her darkness without anyone’s help. I still remember her as if it were yesterday, walking without a stick as if she had both eyes, slow but without hesitation, guided only by different smells. She recognized her room by the vapor of muriatic acid in the workshop next door, the
hallway by the perfume of jasmines in the garden, my grandparents’ bedroom by the smell of the wood alcohol they both would rub on their bodies before they went to sleep, Aunt Mama’s room by the odor of oil in the lamps on the altar, and, at the end of the hallway, the succulent smell of the kitchen. She was slim and silent, with skin like withered lilies and shining hair the color of mother-of-pearl,
which she wore hanging down to her waist and cared for herself. Her green, limpid adolescent’s eyes changed their light to match her states of mind. In any event these were casual walks, for she spent the entire day in her room with the door half closed, and she was almost always alone. Sometimes she sang in whispers to herself, and her voice could be confused with Mina’s, but her songs were
different and sadder. I heard someone say they were
romanzas
from Riohacha, but I discovered only as an adult that in reality she invented them herself as she sang them. Two or three times I could not resist the temptation of going into her room without
anyone knowing, but I did not find her. Years later, during one of my vacations from secondary school, I recounted these memories to my mother,
and she did all she could to persuade me of my error. Her reasoning was absolute, and I could confirm it beyond the shadow of a doubt: Aunt Petra had died before I was two years old.

We called Aunt Wenefrida Nana, and she was the happiest and most amiable of the tribe, but I can recall her only in her sickbed. She was married to Rafael Quintero Ortega—Uncle Quinte—a poor people’s lawyer who had
been born in Chía, some fifteen leagues from Bogotá and at the same altitude above sea level. But he adapted so well to the Caribbean that in the inferno of Cataca he needed hot-water bottles at his feet to sleep in the cool December weather. The family had already recovered from the misfortune of Medardo Pacheco when it was Uncle Quinte’s turn to suffer his own for killing the opposing lawyer
in a lawsuit. He had the image of being a good and peaceable man, but his adversary harassed him without letup, and he had no recourse but to arm himself. He was so small and thin that he wore children’s shoes, and his friends made cordial jokes because the revolver bulged as big as a cannon under his shirt. My grandfather gave him a serious warning with his celebrated phrase: “You don’t know how
heavy a dead man is.” But Uncle Quinte did not have time to think about it when his enemy, shouting like a lunatic, blocked his way in the antechamber of the court and rushed at him with his giant’s body. “I didn’t even know how I pulled out the revolver and shot into the air with both hands and my eyes closed,” Uncle Quinte told me a short while before he died at the age of one hundred. “When I opened
my eyes,” he told me, “I could see him, big and pale and still standing, and then he began a slow collapse until he was sitting on the floor.” Until that moment Uncle Quinte did not know he had hit him in the middle of his forehead. I asked him what he had felt when he saw him fall, and his frankness surprised me:

“Immense relief!”

My last memory of his wife, Wenefrida, was on a night of pouring
rain when a sorceress exorcised her. This was not a
conventional witch but an amiable woman, well dressed in stylish clothes, who used a branch of nettles to drive evil humors out of the body while she sang an incantation that was like a lullaby. All of a sudden Nana writhed in a deep convulsion, and a bird the size of a chicken and with iridescent feathers escaped from between the sheets. The
woman caught it in midair with a masterful blow of her hand and wrapped it in a black cloth she had prepared. She ordered a fire lit in the backyard and without any ceremony tossed the bird into the flames. But Nana did not recover from her ailments.