Living to Tell the Tale (73 page)

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First published in Spain as
Vivir para contarla
by Mondadori (Grijalbo Mondadori, S.A.), Barcelona 2002
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 2003
First published in Penguin Books 2004
This edition published
2014

Copyright © Gabriel García Márquez, 2003

Cover © David Alan Harvey / Magnum Photos

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Portions appeared in the
New Yorker
, February 19, 2002, and in
Zoetrope
vol. 2, no. 3, Fall 1998

ISBN: 978-0-141-91736-8

*
A prayer, unauthorized by the Church, used by campesinos.

*
A
Mambí
(plural
Mambises
) was a Cuban rebel against Spanish rule of the island.

*
The wordplay is based on
escarabajo
[beetle],
abajo
[below], and
arriba
[above].
Escararriba
is an invented word.

*
The ingenuity of the phrase
(Las populares canciones de Agustín Lara no son canciones populares)
is based on the position of the adjective, which gives rise to the two meanings of
popular:
widespread and well liked, and of the people, or folk (as opposed to learned or courtly).

*
An allusion to the traditional saying that every child is born with a loaf of bread—that is, each child is provided
for.

*
The grammatical person and verb form used to express the equivalent of plural “you” differ in Spain and Latin America. The passage translates: “The way you are living now, you not only are in an uncertain situation but are also setting a bad example for the town.”

*
An institution in the Hispanic world, a
tertulia
is a regular informal gathering for conversation; it can take place in a café or in someone’s home.

*
Nueva Granada, or New Granada, was the name of Colombia when it was a Spanish colony.

*
The English equivalent is the
-ly
adverbial ending.

*
“Let’s get them!”

*
The rhymes in English, of course, do not correspond to the ones in Spanish, but they are essentially nonsense verses:
Los piononos para los monos, los diabolines para los mamines, las de coco para los locos, las de panela para Manuela.

*
In addition to “one-eyed,” the word
tuerto
also means “twisted,” “crooked,” or “bent.”

*
In Spanish, many verbs in the imperfect tense have endings based
on
-ía,
which would create a rhyme with the name Buendía.

*
The content of the phrases in English is different from Spanish in order to preserve the repetition of sounds typical of these exercises. The Spanish reads: …
la mula que va al molino y el chocolate del chico de la cachucha chica y el adivino que se dedica a la bebida.

*
A literary genre that focuses on typical or picturesque regional customs.

*
A rasping percussion instrument, also known
as a
güiro,
usually made of wood or a gourd, and sometimes metal, which is played by rubbing a stick up and down along the ridges cut into the instrument.

*
This comment is based on a well-known admonition to Latin American poets, early in the twentieth century, to abandon the symbolist and Parnassian school of Modernism for a more local and relevant style of writing.

*
Cantor
is the equivalent of “singer” or “songbird.”

*
Identification for those under eighteen.