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

might see him and the torment that she might not. From the godmother and godson they had once been, they began to treat each other as strangers. One afternoon, as they weresewing beneath the almond trees, Aunt Francisca teased her niece with mischievous guile:
    “I heard somebody gave you a rose.”
    Well, as usual, Luisa Santiaga would be the last to know that the torments of her heart were already common knowledge. In the numerous conversations I had with her and my father, they both agreed that their explosive love had three decisive moments. The first was on aPalm Sunday during High Mass. She was sitting with Aunt Francisca on a bench on the side of the epistolary when she recognized the sound of his flamenco heels on the floor tiles and saw him pass so close that she felt the warm gust of his bridegroom’s cologne. Aunt Francisca appeared not to have noticed him, and he appeared not to have noticed them either. But the truth was that it had all been premeditatedby him, and he had been following them since they walked past the telegraph office. He remained standing next to the column closest to the door so that he could observe her from the back but she could not see him. After a few intense minutes Luisa Santiaga could not bear the suspense, and she looked over her shoulder toward the door. Then she thought she would die of rage because he waslooking at her, and their eyes met. “It was just what I had planned,” my father would say with pleasure when he repeated the story to me in his old age.My mother, on the other hand, never tired of saying that for three days she had not been able to control her fury at falling into the trap.
    The second moment was a letter he wrote to her. Not the kind she might have expected from a poet and violinistof furtive serenades, but an imperious note demanding a reply before he traveled to Santa Marta the following week. She did not reply. She locked herself in her room, determined to kill the worm that did not leave her enough breath to live, until Aunt Francisca tried to persuade her to capitulate once and for all before it was too late. In an effort to overcome her resistance, she told LuisaSantiaga the exemplary tale of Juventino Trillo, the suitor who stood guard every night from seven to ten under the balcony of his impossible beloved. She attacked him with every insult that occurred to her, and in the end she stood on the balcony night after night and emptied a chamber-pot of urine on his head. But she could not drive him away. After every kind of baptismal assault—moved by theself-sacrifice of that invincible love—she married him. My parents’ story did not reach those extremes.
    The third moment in the siege was a grand wedding to which both had been invited as patrons of honor. Luisa Santiaga could find no excuse not to attend an event of such importance to her family. But Gabriel Eligio had the same thought, and he attended the celebration prepared for anything.She could not control her heart when she saw him crossing the room with the obvious intention of asking her to dance the first dance. “My blood was pounding so hard in my body I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or fear,” she told me. He realized this and delivered a brutal blow: “Now you don’t have to say yes because your heart is saying it for you.”
    Without a word, she left him standing inthe middle of the room while the music was still playing. But my father understood this in his own way.
    “It made me happy,” he told me.
    Luisa Santiaga could not endure the rancor she felt toward herself when she was awakened before dawn by the strains of the poisoned waltz, “After the Ball Is Over.” The first thing shedid the next morning was to return all Gabriel Eligio’s gifts to him. Thisundeserved rebuff, and the gossip about her walking away from him at the wedding, like feathers tossed into the air had no winds to bring them back. Everyone assumed it was the inglorious end of a summer storm.