Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman Read Free Book Online

a large, well-lit living room, a dining room like a terrace with gailycolored flowers, two bedrooms, a courtyard with a gigantic chestnut tree, a well-tended vegetable garden, and a corral where the goats lived in peaceful fellowship withthe pigs and chickens. According to the most frequent version, this house was reduced to ashes by fireworks that fell on the palm roof during the celebrations one July 20, Independence Day, of who knows which year of so many differentwars. All that remained were the cement floors and the suite of two rooms with a door to the street where Papalelo had his offices on the several occasions when he was a public official.
    On the still-warm ruins the family built its definitive shelter. A linear house with eight successive rooms along a hallway with an alcove filled with begonias where the women in the family would sit to embroideron frames and talk in the cool of the evening. The rooms were simple and did not differ from one another, but a single glance was enough for me to know that in each of their countless details lay a crucial moment of my life.
    The first room served as a reception room and personal office for my grandfather. It had a rolltop desk, a padded swivel chair, an electric fan, and an empty bookcase witha single enormous, tattered book: a dictionary of the Spanish language. Right next to it was the workshop where my grandfather spent his best hours making the little gold fish with articulated bodies and tiny emerald eyes, which provided him with more joy than food. Certain notable personages were received there, in particular politicians, unemployed public officials, and war veterans. Among them,on different occasions, two historic visitors: Generals Rafael Uribe Uribe and Benjamín Herrera, both of whom had lunch with the family. But what my grandmother remembered about Uribe Uribe for the rest of her life was his moderation at the table: “He ate like a bird.”
    Because of our Caribbean culture, the space shared by the office and workshop was forbidden to women, just as the town tavernswere forbidden to them by law. Still, in time it was turned into a hospital room where Aunt Petra died and Wenefrida Márquez, Papalelo’s sister, endured the last months of a long illness. That initiated the hermetic paradise of the many resident and transient women who passed through the house during my childhood. I was the only male who enjoyed the privileges of both worlds.
    The dining roomwas simply a widened section of the hallway with the alcove where the women of the house sat to sew, and a table for sixteen expected or unexpected diners who would arrive every day on the noon train. From there my mother contemplated the broken pots of begonias, the rotted stubble, the trunk of the jasmine plant eaten away by ants, and she recovered her breath.
    “Sometimes we couldn’t breathebecause of the jasmines’ hot perfume,” she said, looking at the brilliant sky, and she sighed with all her heart. “But what I’ve missed most since then is the three o’clock thunder.”
    That moved me, because I also remembered the single crash like a torrent of stones that woke us from our siesta, but I never had been aware that it happened only at three.
    After the hallway there was a parlor reservedfor special occasions, while ordinary visitors were greeted with cold beer in the office if they were men, or in the hallway with the begonias if they were women. Then began the mythic world of the bedrooms. First my grandparents’ room, with a large door to the garden, and a woodcut of flowers with the date of construction: 1925. There, out of the blue, my mother gave me the most unexpectedsurprise with a triumphant emphasis:
    “Here’s where you were born!”
    I had not known that before, or I had forgotten it, but in the next room we found the crib where I slept until I was four years old and that my grandmother kept forever. I had forgotten it, but as soon as I saw it I remembered myself in the