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

blood. When his handlers succeeded in taking him back to the bull pen, the revelry ofthe drama had already begun in the house and would last more than a week, with endless pots of coffee and sponge cakes to accompany the tale, repeated a thousand times and each time more heroic than the last, of the agitated survivors.
    The courtyard did not seem very large, but it had a great variety of trees, an uncovered bath with a cement tank for rain-water, and an elevated platform thatone reached by climbing a fragile ladder some three meters high. The two large barrels that my grandfather filled at dawn with a manual pump were located there. Beyond that was the stable made of rough boards and the servants’ quarters, and at the very end the enormous backyard with fruit trees and the only latrine, where day and night the Indian maids emptied the chamber pots from the house. Theleafiest and most hospitable tree was a chestnut at the edge of the world and of time, under whose ancient branchesmore than two colonels retired from the many civil wars of the previous century must have died while urinating.
    The family had come to Aracataca seventeen years before my birth, when the United Fruit Company began its intrigues to take control of the banana monopoly. They broughttheir son Juan de Dios, who was twenty-one, and their two daughters, Margarita María Miniata de Alacoque, who was nineteen, and Luisa Santiaga, my mother, who was five. Before her they had lost twin girls by miscarriage four months into the pregnancy. When she had my mother, my grandmother announced that she had given birth for the last time, for she was now forty-two years old. Almost half a centurylater, at the same age and under identical circumstances, my mother said the same thing when her eleventh child, Eligio Gabriel, was born.
    The move to Aracataca was seen by my grandparents as a journey into forgetting. In their service they brought two Goajiro Indians—Alirio and Apolinar—and an Indian woman—Meme—purchased in their own region for a hundred pesos each when slavery had already beenabolished. The colonel, pursued by sinister remorse for having killed a man in an affair of honor, brought everything necessary for recreating the past as far away as possible from his bad memories. He had seen the area many years earlier in a campaign, when he passed through on his way to Ciénaga, and in his capacity as quartermaster general he was present at the signing of the Treaty of Neerlandia.
    The new house did not give them back their tranquility, because his remorse was so pernicious it would still infect an errant great-great-grandson. The most frequent and intense evocations, with which we had shaped an ordered version of events, were those of my grandmother Mina, who by this time was blind and half crazed. However, in the midst of implacable gossip regarding the imminent tragedy,she was the only one who did not hear about the duel until after it had been fought.
    The drama took place in Barrancas, a peaceful and prosperous town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the colonel learned the goldsmith’s craft from his father and grandfather, and where he had returned to live when the peace treaties hadbeen signed. His adversary was a giant sixteen years younger thanhe, a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal like him, a militant Catholic and a poor farmer who had recently married and had two children and a good man’s name: Medardo Pacheco. The saddest thing for the colonel must have been that it was not any of the numerous faceless enemies he had confronted on battlefields but an old friend, ally, and fellow soldier in the War of a Thousand Days whom he had to fightto the death when both of them believed that peace had been won.
    This was the first incident from real life that stirred my writer’s instincts, and I still have not been able to exorcise it. Ever since I gained the use of my reason, I had been aware of the magnitude and weight that the drama had in our