Bogotá . 23 cm. 579 p. Encuadernación en tapa blanda de editorial ilustrada. García Márquez, Gabriel, 1927-2014 .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario.

Vivir Para Contarla

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Sudamericana

Copyright © 2002 Gabriel Garcia Marquez
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9789500722988

Chapter One

Please note: This translation appeared originally in The New Yorker in February 2002. Below, you will find the Spanish excerpt from the version that is in stores now.

Serenade by Gabriel García Márquez

My mother became a woman in a godforsaken hellhole. She had spent an uncertain childhood plagued by malarial fevers, but, once cured, she was cured completely and forever, and with her health as strong as reinforced concrete she was able to celebrate her ninety-fifth birthday with eleven of her own children, and four of her husband’s, and sixty-six grandchildren, seventy-three great-grandchildren, and five great-great-grandchildren. Not counting the ones nobody ever knew about.
Her name was Luisa Santiaga, and she was the third daughter of Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía and his wife (and first cousin) Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, whom we called Mina. Luisa Santiaga was born in Barrancas, in Colombia, on the banks of the Ranchería River, on July 25, 1905, when the family was recovering from the disaster of the civil wars, and two years after the Colonel, her father, had killed Medardo Pacheco in a duel over a point of honor. Luisa, her first name, was in memory of her paternal grandmother, Luisa Mejía Vidal, who had died the month before her birth. Santiaga, her second name, was in honor of the apostle Santiago el Mayor, St. James the Greater, who was decapitated in Jerusalem. She kept the second name a secret, because it seemed masculine and ostentatious, until a faithless son revealed it in a novel.

Luisa Santiaga had the education typical of a well-bred Catholic girl, brought up by a family of happy sinners. Educated at the Colegio de la Presentación, in Santa Marta, she was a diligent student in all areas, except the music lessons imposed on her by a mother who couldn’t conceive of a respectable señorita who was not an accomplished pianist. For three years, an obedient Luisa Santiaga attended her lessons, and then one day, overcome by the tedium of practicing every afternoon in the sultry heat of siesta time, she abandoned them. Nevertheless, the only virtue that would be of any use to her, in all of her twenty years, was the strength of her character when her family discovered she was madly in love with a young, proud telegraph operator from Aracataca. Her family had moved to Aracataca after the killing of Medardo Pacheco.

The history of their forbidden love was one of the wonders of my youth. Having heard that history told so many times by my parents—sometimes by both of them together, sometimes by each one alone—it was almost intact in my mind when, at the age of twenty-three, I wrote my first novel, "Leaf Storm," though I knew I still had much to learn about the art of writing novels. They were both excellent storytellers, happy in their recollections of their love, but they were also 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 couldn’t distinguish between life and poetry.

According to my mother’s version, the two of them met at a wake for a child. She was singing in the courtyard with her friends, following the popular custom of singing love songs to pass the time through the nine nights of mourning for innocents. Out of nowhere, a man’s voice joined the choir. All the girls turned to look at the man who was singing and were stunned by his good looks. "He is the one we’re going to marry," they chanted, and clapped their hands in unison. He did not, however, impress my mother. "He was," she said, "just another stranger." And he was. His name was Gabriel Eligio García, and after having abandoned his medical and pharmaceutical studies in Cartagena de Indias, owing to a lack of funds, he’d found work in some of the nearby towns in the more mundane profession of telegraph operator. A photograph from that time shows him distinguished by the equivocal bearing of impoverished gentility. He wore a suit of dark taffeta, with a four-button jacket, very close-fitting, in the style of the day, and a high, stiff collar, wide tie, and flat-brimmed straw hat. He also wore fashionable round spectacles with thin wire frames. He had a reputation as a hard-living, womanizing bohemian, but he never had a cigarette or a glass of alcohol in his long life.

Although it was the first time my mother saw him, he had seen her the previous Sunday at eight o’clock Mass, guarded by her Aunt Francisca Simodosea Mejía. He had seen them again the following Tuesday, sewing beneath the almond trees near the front door to the family house. By the night of the wake, he had learned she was the daughter of Colonel Nicolás Márquez, to whom he was already bearing letters of introduction. After that night, she learned he was a bachelor, with a facility for falling in love, whose immediate local success arose from an inexhaustible gift for conversation, an ease in writing verse, a grace on the dance floor, and a predisposition for playing the violin with a sentimental flair. My mother told me that when you heard his playing in the small hours of the morning you felt an irresistible urge to weep. His calling card was "After the Ball," a waltz of consummate romanticism that was an invariable feature of his serenades. These heartwarming talents, and his powerful charm, opened the doors of the Colonel’s house and earned Gabriel Eligio a regular place at family lunches. Aunt Francisca adopted him without reservation when she learned that he had been born in Sincé, a town near her birthplace. At these gatherings, he entertained my mother with his proficiency in the arts of seduction, but it never occurred to her that such displays had any significance. On the contrary, their friendly relations were understood to be a pretense, meant to hide the secret love between him and a classmate of hers, and my mother even agreed to act as a godparent at their future wedding. (He took to calling her "godmother" and she called him "godson.") It is easy, then, to imagine the extent of Luisa Santiaga’s surprise when, one night at a dance, the bold telegraph operator took the flower from his buttonhole and handed it to her, saying, "I give you my life in this rose."

There was, he told me many times, nothing spontaneous about the gesture; by then, after meeting many girls, he’d reached the conclusion that Luisa Santiaga was the one for him. She interpreted the rose as nothing more than one of the playful gallantries he used with her friends. In fact, at the end of the dance that evening she left the flower behind. And yet, while she’d had one secret suitor, a good friend and luckless poet whose ardent verses never succeeded in touching her heart, this rose disturbed her sleep and filled her with an inexplicable fury. In our first formal conversation about their love, when she already had a good number of children, she confessed, "I couldn’t sleep because I was angry thinking about him, but the fact that I was thinking about him made me even angrier, and 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 might see him and the torment that she might not. One afternoon, Aunt Francisca teased her with mischievous guile, as the two of them were sewing beneath the almond trees. "They say somebody gave you a...