Living to Tell the Tale (54 page)

The story is true but not strange in a region and in a guild where the most natural thing is what is astonishing. The accordion, not a native or widespread instrument in Colombia,
is popular in the province of Valledupar and may have been imported from Aruba and Curaçao. During the Second World War its importation from Germany was interrupted, and those that were already in the Province survived because of the care given them by their native owners. One was Leandro Díaz, a carpenter who not only was an inspired composer and master of the accordion, but the only man
during the war who knew how to repair them even though he was blind from birth. The way of life of these genuine troubadours is to go from town to town and sing the amusing and simple facts of ordinary history, at religious or pagan celebrations, and above all in the wild confusion of Carnival. Rafael Escalona’s case was different. The son of Colonel Clemente Escalona, the nephew of the celebrated
Bishop Celedón, and the holder of a baccalaureate from the
liceo
in Santa Marta that bears his name, he began to compose when he was very young, scandalizing his family who considered singing with an accordion something that day laborers did. Not only was he the only troubadour with a baccalaureate degree, he was one of the few in those days who knew how to read and write, and the haughtiest,
most amorous
man who ever existed. But he is not and will not be the last: now there are hundreds of them, younger and younger each day. Bill Clinton understood it this way in the final days of his presidency, when he listened to a group of primary-school children who traveled from the Province to sing for him at the White House.

During those days of good fortune I happened to run into Mercedes
Barcha, the daughter of the pharmacist in Sucre to whom I had been proposing marriage since she was thirteen. In contrast to those other times, at last she accepted an invitation to go dancing the following Sunday at the hotel in El Prado. Only then did I learn that she had moved to Barranquilla with her family because of a political situation that was growing more and more oppressive. Demetrio,
her father, was a hardcore Liberal who was not intimidated by the early threats against him when the persecution and social ignominy of the
pasquines
worsened. But under pressure from his family, he sold off the few things he had left in Sucre and set up his pharmacy in Barranquilla, close to the hotel in El Prado. Although he was the age of my papá, he always maintained a youthful friendship
with me that we would heat up at the tavern across the street, and more than once we ended up in a galley slave’s drunken carousing with the entire group at El Tercer Hombre. At that time Mercedes was studying in Medellín and spent time with her family only during Christmas vacation. She always was amusing and amiable with me, but she had an illusionist’s talent for evading questions and answers and
not allowing herself to be explicit about anything. I had to accept this as a more compassionate stratagem than indifference or rejection, and I resigned myself to her seeing me with her father and his friends in the tavern across the street. If he did not suspect my interest during that vacation of longing, it was because it was the best-kept secret of the first twenty centuries of Christianity.
On various occasions he boasted in El Tercer Hombre about the sentence she had quoted to me in Sucre at our first dance: “My papá says that the prince who will marry me hasn’t been born yet.” I also did not know if she believed him, but she behaved as if she did, until that Christmas holiday when she agreed that
we would meet the following Sunday at the morning dance at the hotel in El Prado.
I am so superstitious that I attributed her decision to the artist’s hairstyle and mustache that the barber had made for me, and the unbleached linen suit and silk tie bought for the occasion at an auction run by Turks. Certain that she would go there with her father, as she did wherever she went, I also invited my sister Aida Rosa, who was spending her vacation with me. But Mercedes showed up very
much alone, and she danced with so much naturalness and so much irony that any serious proposal would have seemed ridiculous to her. That day was the beginning of the unforgettable season of my
compadre
Pacho Galán, the glorious creator of the
merecumbé
that was danced for years and gave rise to new Caribbean airs that are still alive. She danced very well to popular music, and she used her mastery
to elude with magical subtlety the proposals that pursued her. It seems to me her tactic was to make me believe she did not think I was serious, but with so much skill that I always found the way to move ahead.

At twelve sharp she became alarmed about the time and left me standing while the music was still playing, but she did not want me to accompany her even to the door. This seemed so strange
to my sister that in some way she felt responsible, and I still wonder if that sad example did not have something to do with her sudden decision to enter the Salesian convent in Medellín. In time, after that day, Mercedes and I invented a personal code with which we understood each other without saying anything, and even without seeing each other.

I heard from her again after a month, on January
22 of the following year, with an unadorned message that she left for me at
El Heraldo:
“They killed Cayetano.” For us it could be only one person: Cayetano Gentile, our friend in Sucre, a soon-to-be doctor, an organizer of dances, and a lover by trade. The immediate version was that he had been knifed by two brothers of the young teacher at the school in Chaparral: we had seen him ride with her
on his horse. In the course of the day, from one telegram to the next, I learned the complete story.

It was still not the time of easy telephones, and personal long-distance calls were arranged first by telegram. My immediate
reaction was a reporter’s. I decided to travel to Sucre to write the story, but at the paper they interpreted this as a sentimental impulse. And today I understand, because
even back then we Colombians killed one another for any reason at all, and at times we invented one, but crimes of passion were reserved as luxuries for the rich in the cities. It seemed to me that the subject was eternal and I began to take statements from witnesses, until my mother discovered my hidden intentions and begged me not to write the article. At least while Cayetano’s mother, Doña
Julieta Chimento, was alive, the most important of the reasons being that she was my mother’s
comadre
because she had been godmother at the baptism of Hernando, my brother number eight. Her statement—indispensable in a good article—was of great significance. Two of the teacher’s brothers had pursued Cayetano when he tried to take refuge in his house, but Doña Julieta had hurried to lock the street
door because she believed that her son was already in his bedroom. And so he was the one who could not come in, and they stabbed him to death against the locked door.

My immediate reaction was to sit down to write the report of the crime but I found all kinds of impediments. What interested me was no longer the crime itself but the literary theme of collective responsibility. No argument convinced
my mother, however, and it seemed a lack of respect to write it without her permission. But after that not a day went by that I was not hounded by the desire to write the story. I was beginning to become resigned, and then, many years later, I was waiting for a plane to take off at the airport in Algiers. The door to the first-class lounge opened, and an Arab prince came in wearing the immaculate
tunic of his lineage, and carrying on his fist a splendid female peregrine falcon that instead of the leather hood of classic falconry wore one of gold encrusted with diamonds. Of course I thought of Cayetano Gentile, who had learned from his father the fine arts of falconry, at first with local sparrow hawks and then with magnificent examples transplanted from Arabia Felix. At the moment of
his death he had a professional falcon coop on his farm, with two female cousins and a male trained to hunt partridges, and a Scottish kite
skilled in personal defense. I knew about the historic interview of Ernest Hemingway by George Plimpton in
The Paris Review
regarding the process of transforming a character from real life into a character in a novel. Hemingway said: “If I explained how that
is sometimes done, it would be a handbook for libel lawyers.” But after that providential morning in Algiers, my situation was just the opposite: I had no desire to continue living in peace if I did not write the story of the death of Cayetano.

My mother remained firm in her determination to prevent this despite every argument, until thirty years after the drama, when she herself called me in
Barcelona to give me the sad news that Julieta Chimento, Cayetano’s mother, had died without ever getting over the loss of her son. But this time, with her strong moral sense, my mother found no reasons to interfere with the article.

“I ask only one thing as a mother,” she said. “Treat Cayetano as if he were a son of mine.”

The story, with the title
Chronicle of a Death Foretold,
was published
two years later. My mother did not read it for a reason that I keep as another of her gems in my personal museum: “Something that turned out so awful in life can’t turn out well in a book.”

A week after the death of Cayetano, the telephone on my desk rang at five in the afternoon as I was beginning to write my daily assignment at
El Heraldo.
The call was from my papá, who had just arrived in
Barranquilla unannounced and was waiting for me with some urgency at the Café Roma. The tension in his voice frightened me, but I was more alarmed at seeing him as I never had seen him before, disheveled and unshaven, wearing the April 9 sky-blue suit dusty with the suffocating heat of the road, sustained only by the strange placidity of the defeated.

I was so overwhelmed that I do not feel capable
of transmitting the anguish and lucidity with which Papá informed me of the family disaster. Sucre, paradise of the easy life and beautiful girls, had succumbed to the seismic onrush of political violence. The death of Cayetano was no more than a symptom.

“You don’t realize what that hell is like because you live in this oasis of peace,” he said. “But if we’re still alive there it’s because God
knows us.”

He was one of the few members of the Conservative Party who had not needed to hide from raging Liberals after April 9, and now the same Conservatives who had taken refuge in his shadow were repudiating him for his half-heartedness. He painted a picture for me that was so terrifying—and so real—that it more than justified his rash decision to leave everything behind and take the family
to Cartagena. I had no rational or emotional counterargument, but I thought I could slow him down with a solution less radical than an immediate move.

We needed time to think. We had two soft drinks in silence, each of us lost in his own thoughts, and he recovered his feverish idealism before we finished and left me speechless. “The only thing that consoles me in all of this,” he said with a
tremulous sigh, “is my joy that at last you can finish your studies.” I never told him how much I was affected by that illusive happiness for so trivial a reason. I felt an icy gust in my belly, set off by the perverse idea that the family’s exodus was nothing more than a trick of his to oblige me to be a lawyer. I looked straight into his eyes and they were two astonished pools. I realized he was
so defenseless and worried that he would not oblige me to do anything, and would not deny me anything, but he had enough faith in his Divine Providence to believe he could make me surrender through sheer exhaustion. Even more: with the same captive spirit he revealed that he had found me a position in Cartagena and had everything ready for me to begin the following Monday. A wonderful position, he
explained, and I would only have to show up every two weeks to collect my salary.

It was much more than I could digest. With clenched teeth I put forward a few misgivings to prepare him for my final refusal. I told him about the long conversation with my mother on the trip to Aracataca about which I had never received any comments from him, but I had understood that his indifference toward the
subject was the best response. The saddest part was that I was playing with loaded dice, since I knew I would not be
accepted into the university because I had failed two subjects in the second year, which I never made up, and another three in the third year that were unsalvageable. I had hidden this from the family to spare them unnecessary grief, and I did not even want to imagine what Papá’s
reaction would be if I told him that afternoon. At the beginning of our conversation I had resolved not to give in to any sentimental weakness, because it hurt me that so kind a man had to let himself be seen by his children in such a state of defeat. But it seemed to me that this meant placing too much confidence in life. In the end I surrendered to the easy formula of asking him for a night to
think about it.

“Agreed,” he said, “as long as you don’t lose sight of the fact that you hold the fate of the family in your hands.”

The condition was unnecessary. I was so aware of my weakness that when I saw him off on the last bus, at seven in the evening, I had to suborn my heart not to sit in the seat beside him. For me it was clear that we had gone full circle, and the family was so poor
again that it could survive only with the assistance of all its members.

It was not a good night for deciding anything. The police had removed by force several families of refugees fleeing the rural violence in the interior who had camped in the Parque San Nicolás. But the peace in Café Roma was impregnable. The Spanish refugees always asked me what I had heard from Don Ramón Vinyes, and I always
told them as a joke that his letters did not carry news from Spain but worried questions about the news from Barranquilla. After he died they did not mention him again, but they kept his chair empty at the table. A member of his
tertulia
congratulated me for the previous day’s “La Jirafa,” which had reminded him somehow of the heartrending romanticism of Mariano José de Larra, and I never knew
why. Professor Pérez Domenech saved me from an awkward situation with one of his opportune remarks: “I hope you don’t also follow his bad example and shoot yourself.” I believe he would not have said it if he had known to what extent it might have been true that night.