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

overalls with little blue flowers that I was wearing for the first time, screaming forsomebody to come and take off my diapers that were filled with shit. I could barely stand as I clutched at the bars of the crib that was as small and fragile as Moses’ basket. This has been a frequent cause of discussion and joking among relatives and friends, for whom my anguish that day seems too rational for one so young. Above all when I have insisted that the reason for my suffering was notdisgust at my own filth but fear that I would soil my new overalls. That is, it was not a question of hygienic prejudice but esthetic concern, and because of themanner in which it persists in my memory, I believe it was my first experience as a writer.
    In that bedroom there was also an altar with life-size saints, more realistic and gloomy than those of the Church. Aunt Francisca Simodosea Mejíaalways slept there, a first cousin of my grandfather’s whom we called Aunt Mama, who had lived in the house as its lady and mistress since the death of her parents. I slept in a hammock off to the side, terrified by the blinking of the saints in the light of the perpetual lamp that was not extinguished until everyone had died, and my mother slept there, too, when she was single, tormented byher terror of the saints.
    At the end of the hallway there were two rooms that were forbidden to me. In the first lived my cousin Sara Emilia Márquez, a daughter my uncle Juan de Dios had fathered before he was married, who was brought up by my grandparents. In addition to a natural distinction that was hers from the time she was very little, she had a strong personality that woke my first literaryappetites with a wonderful collection of stories, illustrated in full color and published by Calleja, to which she never gave me access for fear I would leave it in disarray. It was my first bitter frustration as a writer.
    The last room was a repository for old furniture and trunks that sparked my curiosity for years but which I was never allowed to explore. Later I learned that also stored therewere the seventy chamber pots my grandparents bought when my mother invited her classmates to spend their vacations in the house.
    Facing these two rooms, along the same hallway, was the large kitchen with primitive portable ovens of calcinated stone, and my grandmother’s large work oven, for she was a professional baker and pastry chef whose little candy animals saturated the dawn with theirsucculent aroma. This was the realm of the women who lived or served in the house, and they sang in a chorus with my grandmother as they helped her in her many tasks. Another voice was that of Lorenzo el Magnífico, the hundred-year-old parrot inherited from my great-grandparents,who would shout anti-Spanish slogans and sing songs from the War for Independence. He was so shortsighted that he hadfallen into a pot of stew and was saved by a miracle because the water had only just begun to heat. One July 20, at three in the afternoon, he roused the house with shrieks of panic:
    “The bull, the bull! The bull’s coming!”
    Only the women were in the house, for the men had gone to the local bullfight held on the national holiday, and they thought the parrot’s screams were no more than a deliriumof his senile dementia. The women of the house, who knew how to talk to him, understood what he was shouting only when a wild bull that had escaped the bull pens on the square burst into the kitchen, bellowing like a steamship and in a blind rage charging the equipment in the bakery and the pots on the stoves. I was going in the opposite direction when the gale of terrified women lifted me intothe air and took me with them into the storeroom. The bellowing of the runaway bull in the kitchen and the galloping of his hooves on the cement floor of the hallway shook the house. Without warning he appeared at a ventilation skylight, and the fiery panting of his breath and his large reddened eyes froze my