Living to Tell the Tale (49 page)

The atmosphere I found
in Sucre was very favorable to my ideas at the time. I wrote to Germán Vargas and asked him to send me books, lots of books, as many as possible so that I could drown a predicted convalescence of six months in masterpieces. The town was inundated. Papá had renounced the slavery of the pharmacy, and at the entrance to town he had built a house large enough for his children, who numbered eleven after
the birth of Eligio sixteen months earlier. A large house full of light, with a terrace for visitors overlooking the river of dark water, and windows opened to the January breezes. It had six well-ventilated bedrooms with a bed for each person—not shared, as before—and hooks for hanging hammocks at different levels, even in the hallways. The courtyard had no wire fence, and it extended all the
way to uncut woods with fruit trees in the public domain, and animals belonging to the family and to other people strolled through the bedrooms. My mother, who missed the courtyards of her childhood in Barrancas and Aracataca, treated the new house like a farm, with uncorralled chickens and ducks and libertine pigs who got into the kitchen to eat the food for lunch. It was still possible to take
advantage of the summers and sleep with open windows, with the asthmatic sound of the chickens on their perches and the odor of ripe custard apples that fell from the trees at dawn with an instantaneous, dense thud. “They sound like children,” my mother would say. My papá reduced his consultations to the
morning hours for a few believers in homeopathy, continued reading all the printed paper that
came near him as he lay in a hammock that he hung between two trees, and contracted the idle fever of billiards to counter the melancholy of dusk. He had also abandoned his white linen suits with a tie, and he walked on the street as I had never seen him do before, wearing juvenile short-sleeved shirts.

My grandmother Tranquilina Iguarán had died two months earlier, blind and deranged, and in
the lucidity of her death agony she continued preaching the family’s secrets in her radiant voice and perfect diction. Her constant subject until her final breath was my grandfather’s retirement. My father prepared the body with preservative aloes and covered it with lime inside the coffin for a gentle decomposition. Luisa Santiaga always marveled at her mother’s passion for red roses, and she made
her a garden at the back of the courtyard so there would always be enough for her grave. They bloomed with so much splendor that there was not enough time to satisfy the strangers who came from great distances, eager to know if so many magnificent roses were the work of God or the devil.

Changes in my life and temperament corresponded to changes in my house. On each visit it seemed different
to me because of my parents’ alterations and transformations on account of my brothers and sisters, who were born and grew up looking so much alike it was easier to confuse them than to recognize them. Jaime, who was already ten, took the longest to leave the maternal lap because he had been three months premature, and my mother was still nursing him when Hernando (Nanchi) was born. Three years later
came Alfredo Ricardo (Cuqui), and a year and a half after that Eligio (Yiyo), the last one, who on that vacation was beginning to discover the miracle of crawling.

We also included my father’s children before and after his marriage: Carmen Rosa, in San Marcos, and Abelardo, both of whom spent periods of time in Sucre; Germaine Hanai (Emi), whom my mother had taken in as one of her own with the
approval of her other children, and, last of all, Antonio María
Claret (Toño), brought up by his mother in Sincé, who visited us often. A total of fifteen, and we ate like thirty when there was enough, and sat wherever there was room.

The stories that my sisters have told about those years give an exact idea of what it was like in a house where one child had not finished nursing when another
was born. My mother herself was conscious of her negligence, and she begged her daughters to take charge of the younger ones. Margot would die of fright when she learned that my mother was pregnant again, because she knew she would not have the time to rear them all. And so before she left for boarding school in Montería, she pleaded with my mother in absolute seriousness to make the next child the
last. My mother promised, as she always did, though it was only to please her, because she was certain that God, in His infinite wisdom, would resolve the problem in the best possible fashion.

Meals at the table were disastrous, because there was no way for everyone to eat together. My mother and the older girls would serve as the others came in, but it was not unusual for a stray to wander in
late asking for his portion. In the course of the night the younger ones kept going to my parents’ bed, unable to sleep because of the cold or the heat, because they had a toothache or were afraid of the dead, because they loved their parents or were jealous of the others, and all of them woke the next morning curled up in the double bed. If others were not born after Eligio it was thanks to Margot,
who imposed her authority when she returned from boarding school, and my mother kept her promise not to have another child.

Sad to say, reality had time to interpose other plans for my two oldest sisters, who never married. Aida, as happened in sentimental novels, entered a convent on a life sentence, which she renounced after twenty-two years of meeting every obligation, when she no longer found
Rafael or any other man within reach. Margot, with her stern character, lost her Rafael because of an error on both their parts. To counter precedents as sad as these, Rita married the first man she liked, and was happy with five children and nine grandchildren. The other two girls—Ligia
and Emi—married the men they wanted to when my parents had already grown tired of doing battle with real life.

The family’s troubles seemed to be part of the crisis the country was going through because of economic uncertainty and the bloodshed of the political violence that had reached Sucre like an ill-fated season and entered the house, on tiptoe but with a firm step. By that time we had already eaten our scant reserves and were as poor as we had been in Barranquilla before the move to Sucre. But my
mother did not worry because of her already proven certainty that each child carries his own loaf of bread under his arm. This was the state of the house when I arrived from Cartagena, convalescing from pneumonia, but the family had conspired to keep me from noticing.

The favorite subject of gossip in the town was the supposed relationship between our friend Cayetano Gentile and the schoolteacher
in the nearby hamlet of Chaparral, a beautiful girl whose social status was different from his but who was very serious and came from a respectable family. It was not surprising: Cayetano always chased girls, not only in Sucre but also in Cartagena, where he had completed his baccalaureate and begun his study of medicine. But no one had known of any sweetheart in Sucre or even a favorite partner
at dances.

One night we saw him coming from his farm on his best horse, the schoolteacher in the saddle holding the reins, and he sitting behind, his arms around her waist. We were surprised not only by the degree of intimacy they had achieved, but by their audacity in entering along the promenade of the main square at the time it was most crowded, and in so evil-minded a town. Cayetano explained
to anyone who wished to listen that he had found her at the door of her school waiting for someone kind enough to take her into town at that time of night. I warned him as a joke that he was going to wake up any day now with a
pasquín
on his door, and he shrugged in a typical gesture of his and cracked his favorite joke:

“They don’t dare to with the rich.”

In fact, the
pasquines
had gone out
of fashion as fast as they had come in, and people thought that perhaps they were
another symptom of the bad political mood devastating the country. Serenity returned to the sleep of those who had feared them. On the other hand, a few days after my arrival, I felt that something had changed toward me in the minds of certain of my father’s fellow party members, who pointed me out as the author
of articles against the Conservative government that had been published in
El Universal.
It was not true. If I ever had to write political pieces, they were always unsigned and the responsibility of management after their decision to suspend the question of what had happened in Carmen de Bolívar. The ones in my signed column no doubt revealed a clear position on the sad state of the country, and
the ignominy of the violence and injustice, but there were no party slogans. In fact, I was never a member of any party, not then, not ever. The accusation alarmed my parents, and my mother began to light candles to the saints, above all when I stayed out very late. For the first time I felt so oppressive an atmosphere around me that I decided to leave the house as little as possible.

It was
during these ugly times that an imposing man who seemed to be the ghost of himself appeared in Papá’s office, with a skin that let the color of his bones show through and an abdomen as swollen and tense as a drum. He needed only one sentence to be remembered forever:

“Doctor, they made a monkey grow in my belly and I’ve come to have you take it out.”

After examining him, my father knew the case
was beyond the reach of his science, and he sent him to a surgeon who did not find the monkey the patient thought was there but a formless monstrosity with a life of its own. What mattered to me, however, was not the beast in his abdomen but the tale the patient told about the magical world of La Sierpe, a legendary country within the town limits of Sucre that could be reached only through steaming
bogs, where it was common practice to avenge an offense with a curse, like having the devil’s spawn grow inside your abdomen.

The residents of La Sierpe were devout Catholics but they lived the religion in their own way, with magic prayers for each occasion. They believed in God, in the Virgin, and in the Holy
Trinity, but they worshipped them in any object that they thought revealed divine faculties.
What might seem unimaginable to them was that someone who had a satanic beast growing inside his abdomen would be rational enough to have recourse to the heresy of a surgeon.

I was soon amazed to learn that everybody in Sucre knew about the existence of La Sierpe as a real fact, the only problem being getting there past all kinds of geographical and mental obstacles. I happened to discover that
the expert on the subject of La Sierpe was my friend Ángel Casij, whom I had last seen when he escorted us through the pestilential rubble of April 9 so that we could communicate with our families. I found him more reasonable than he had been on that occasion, and with a dazzling account of his various trips to La Sierpe. Then I learned all that could be known about La Marquesita, lady and mistress
of that vast kingdom, who knew secret prayers for doing good or evil, for raising a dying man from his bed without knowing anything more about him than his physical description and precise location, or for sending a serpent through the swamps so that in six days’ time it would kill an enemy.

The only thing forbidden to her was the resurrection of the dead, a power reserved to God. She lived all
the years she wished, and it is supposed she reached two hundred thirty-three, but without having aged a single day after sixty-six. Before she died she brought together her fabulous flocks and had them spin around her house for two days and two nights until the swamp of La Sierpe was formed, a limitless expanse hung with phosphorescent anemones. It is said that in the center there is a tree hung
with golden gourds, and to its trunk is tied a canoe that every second of November, the Day of the Dead, goes sailing with no one in it to the other shore, guarded by white caimans and snakes wearing golden bells, where La Marquesita buried her unlimited fortune.

After Ángel Casij told me this fantastic story, I began to be plagued by a longing to visit the paradise of La Sierpe mired in reality.
We prepared everything, horses immunized by contrary prayers, invisible canoes, magical guides, and everything
that might be necessary for writing the chronicle of a supernatural realism.

But the mules were left saddled. My slow convalescence from pneumonia, the mockery of friends at the dances on the square, and the dire warnings of older friends obliged me to put off the trip for a later that
never came. Today I recall it, however, as a fortunate misfortune, because lacking the fantastic La Marquesita, I immersed myself the next day in writing a first novel, of which only the title remains:
La casa.

It was supposed to be a drama about the War of a Thousand Days in the Colombian Caribbean, about which I had talked to Manuel Zapata Olivella on an earlier visit to Cartagena. On that
occasion, and with no relation at all to my project, he gave me a pamphlet written by his father about a veteran of that war whose portrait was printed on the cover, and who, with his
liquilique
shirt and his mustache singed by gunpowder, reminded me somehow of my grandfather. I have forgotten his first name, but his surname would stay with me forever after: Buendía. That was why I thought I would
write a novel with the title
La casa,
the epic tale of a family that could have in it a good deal of our own history during the sterile wars of Colonel Nicolás Márquez.

The title was based on my intention of never having the action leave the house. I made several starts and partial outlines of characters, to whom I gave family names that I was able to use later in other books. I am very sensitive
to the weakness of a sentence in which two words in proximity rhyme, even if the rhyme is assonant, and I prefer not to publish it until I solve the problem. This was why I was often on the verge of dispensing with the name Buendía because of its unavoidable rhyme with verbs in the imperfect tense.
^*
But in the end the name imposed itself because I had achieved a convincing identity for it.

I
was involved in this when a wooden crate without painted labels or any other kind of reference appeared one morning at the house in Sucre. My sister Margot accepted it, not knowing
from whom, certain it was some leftover from the pharmacy that had been sold. I thought the same thing and had breakfast with the family, my heart in its right place. My papá said he had not opened the crate because
he thought it was the rest of my luggage, not remembering that I no longer had the rest of anything in this world. My brother Gustavo, who at the age of thirteen already had practice in nailing or unnailing anything, decided to open it without permission. Minutes later we heard his shout: