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

mourning for innocents. Out of nowhere, a man’s voice joined the choir. All the girls turned to stare and were stunned by his good looks. “He’sthe one we’re going to marry,” they sang in chorus to the rhythm of their clapping hands. He did not impress my mother, and she said so: “He looked like just another stranger to me.” And he was. He had just arrived from Cartagena de Indias after interrupting his medical and pharmaceutical studies for lack of funds, and had begun a somewhat commonplace life in several towns of the region in therecent profession of telegraph operator. A photograph from those days shows him with the equivocal air of an impoverished gentleman. He was wearing a suit of dark taffeta with a four-button jacket, very close-fitting in the style of the day, a high stiff collar and wide tie, and a flat-brimmed straw hat. He also wore fashionable round spectacles with thin wire frames and clear lenses. Those who knewhim at the time saw him as a hard-living, womanizing bohemian who nonetheless never drank alcohol or smoked a cigarette in his long life.
    That was the first time my mother laid eyes on him. He, on the other hand, had seen her the previous Sunday at eight o’clock Mass, guarded by her aunt, Francisca Simodosea, who had been her companion since her return from school. He had seen them again thefollowing Tuesday, sewing beneath the almond trees at the door to the house, so that on the night of the wake he already knew she was the daughter of Colonel Nicolás Márquez, for whom he had several letters of introduction. After that night she also learned that he was a bachelor with a propensity for falling in love who had an immediate success because of his inexhaustible gift for conversation,his ease in writing verse, the grace with which he danced to popular music, and the premeditated sentimentality with which he played the violin. My mother would tell me that when you heard him playing in the small hours of the morning, the urge to weep was irresistible. His calling card in society had been “After the Ball Is Over,” a waltz of consummate romanticism that was part of his repertoireand had become indispensable in his serenades. These amiable safe-conducts and his personal charm opened the doors of the house to him and earned him a frequent place at family lunches. Aunt Francisca, a native of Carmen de Bolívar, adopted him without reservation when she learned he had been born in Sincé, a town near her birthplace. Luisa Santiaga was entertained at social gatherings by his seducer’sstratagems, but it never occurred to her that he would want anything more. On the contrary: their good relations were based above all on her serving as a screen for the secret love between him and a classmate of hers, and she had agreed to act as his godparent at the wedding. From then on he called her godmother and she called him godson. It is easy, then, to imagine Luisa Santiaga’s surpriseone night at a dance when the audacious telegraph operator took the flower from his buttonhole and said to her:
    “I give you my life in this rose.”
    This was not a spontaneous gesture, he told me many times, but after meeting all the girls he had concluded that Luisa Santiaga was the one for him. She interpreted the rose as anotherof the playful gallantries he used with her friends. To the extentthat when she left the dance, she also left the flower somewhere, and he knew it. She’d had only one secret suitor, a luckless poet and good friend who had never touched her heart with his ardent verses. But Gabriel Eligio’s rose disturbed her sleep with inexplicable fury. In our first formal conversation about their love, when she already had a good number of children, she confessed to me: “Icouldn’t sleep because I was angry thinking about him, but what made me even angrier was that the angrier I became the more I thought about him.” For the rest of the week it was all she could do to endure the terror that she