Read Online Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman - Free Book Online
Authors: Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman
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country without frontiers.
But the unforgettable colony for us was the Venezuelan; in one of their houses two adolescent studentson vacation would bathe with bucketsful of water from the icy cisterns of dawn: half a century later, Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni would be successive presidents of their country. Among the Venezuelans, the closest to us was Miz Juana de Freytes, a striking matron with a biblical gift for narration. The first formal story I knew was “Genoveva of Brabante,” which I heard from her along with themasterpieces of world literature that she reducedto children’s stories: the
Odyssey, Orlando Furioso, Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo,
and many episodes from the Bible.
My grandfather’s lineage was one of the most respectable but also the least powerful. But he was distinguished by a respectability recognized even by the native-born dignitaries of the banana company. It was that of theLiberal veterans of the civil wars who remained there after the last two treaties, following the good example of General Benjamín Herrera, on whose farm in Neerlandia one could hear in the afternoons melancholy waltzes from his peacetime clarinet.
My mother became a woman in that hellhole and filled the space in everybody’s heart after typhus carried off Margarita María Miniata. She, too, wassickly. She had spent an uncertain childhood plagued by tertian fevers, but when she was treated for the last one the cure was complete and forever, and her health allowed her to celebrate her ninety-seventh birthday with eleven of her children and four more of her husband’s, sixty-five grandchildren, eighty-eight great-grandchildren, and fourteen great-great-grandchildren. Not counting those noone ever knew about. She died of natural causes on June 9, 2002, at eight-thirty in the evening, when we were already preparing to celebrate her first century of life, and on the same day and almost at the same hour that I put the final period to these memoirs.
She was born in Barrancas on July 25, 1905, when the family was just beginning to recover from the disaster of the wars. She was givenher first name in honor of Luisa Mejía Vidal, the colonel’s mother, who had been dead for a month on the day she was born. She got her second name because it was the day of the apostle Santiago el Mayor, decapitated in Jerusalem. She hid this name for half her life because she thought it masculine and ostentatious, until a disloyal son betrayed her in a novel.
She was a diligent student exceptfor the piano class that her mother imposed on her because she could not conceive of a respectable young lady who was not an accomplished pianist. Luisa Santiaga studied for three years out of obedience anddropped it in a day because of the tedium of daily exercises in the sultry heat of siesta. But the only virtue of use to her in the flower of her twenty years was the strength of her characterwhen the family discovered that she was mad with love for the young and haughty telegraph operator from Aracataca.
The history of their forbidden love was another of the wonders of my youth. Having heard it told so often by my parents—sometimes by both of them together and sometimes by each one alone—I knew almost the entire story when I wrote
Leaf Storm,
my first novel, at the age of twenty-seven,even though I was also aware that I still had a good deal to learn about the art of writing novels. They were both excellent storytellers and had a joyful recollection of their love, but they became so impassioned in their accounts that when I was past fifty and had decided at last to use their story in
Love in the Time of Cholera,
I could not distinguish between life and poetry.
According tomy mother’s version, they met for the first time at the wake for a child that neither one could identify for me. She was singing in the courtyard with her friends, following the popular custom of singing love songs to pass the time during the nine nights of
But the unforgettable colony for us was the Venezuelan; in one of their houses two adolescent studentson vacation would bathe with bucketsful of water from the icy cisterns of dawn: half a century later, Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni would be successive presidents of their country. Among the Venezuelans, the closest to us was Miz Juana de Freytes, a striking matron with a biblical gift for narration. The first formal story I knew was “Genoveva of Brabante,” which I heard from her along with themasterpieces of world literature that she reducedto children’s stories: the
Odyssey, Orlando Furioso, Don Quixote, The Count of Monte Cristo,
and many episodes from the Bible.
My grandfather’s lineage was one of the most respectable but also the least powerful. But he was distinguished by a respectability recognized even by the native-born dignitaries of the banana company. It was that of theLiberal veterans of the civil wars who remained there after the last two treaties, following the good example of General Benjamín Herrera, on whose farm in Neerlandia one could hear in the afternoons melancholy waltzes from his peacetime clarinet.
My mother became a woman in that hellhole and filled the space in everybody’s heart after typhus carried off Margarita María Miniata. She, too, wassickly. She had spent an uncertain childhood plagued by tertian fevers, but when she was treated for the last one the cure was complete and forever, and her health allowed her to celebrate her ninety-seventh birthday with eleven of her children and four more of her husband’s, sixty-five grandchildren, eighty-eight great-grandchildren, and fourteen great-great-grandchildren. Not counting those noone ever knew about. She died of natural causes on June 9, 2002, at eight-thirty in the evening, when we were already preparing to celebrate her first century of life, and on the same day and almost at the same hour that I put the final period to these memoirs.
She was born in Barrancas on July 25, 1905, when the family was just beginning to recover from the disaster of the wars. She was givenher first name in honor of Luisa Mejía Vidal, the colonel’s mother, who had been dead for a month on the day she was born. She got her second name because it was the day of the apostle Santiago el Mayor, decapitated in Jerusalem. She hid this name for half her life because she thought it masculine and ostentatious, until a disloyal son betrayed her in a novel.
She was a diligent student exceptfor the piano class that her mother imposed on her because she could not conceive of a respectable young lady who was not an accomplished pianist. Luisa Santiaga studied for three years out of obedience anddropped it in a day because of the tedium of daily exercises in the sultry heat of siesta. But the only virtue of use to her in the flower of her twenty years was the strength of her characterwhen the family discovered that she was mad with love for the young and haughty telegraph operator from Aracataca.
The history of their forbidden love was another of the wonders of my youth. Having heard it told so often by my parents—sometimes by both of them together and sometimes by each one alone—I knew almost the entire story when I wrote
Leaf Storm,
my first novel, at the age of twenty-seven,even though I was also aware that I still had a good deal to learn about the art of writing novels. They were both excellent storytellers and had a joyful recollection of their love, but they became so impassioned in their accounts that when I was past fifty and had decided at last to use their story in
Love in the Time of Cholera,
I could not distinguish between life and poetry.
According tomy mother’s version, they met for the first time at the wake for a child that neither one could identify for me. She was singing in the courtyard with her friends, following the popular custom of singing love songs to pass the time during the nine nights of
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