Living to Tell the Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

waking. Stores, public offices, and schools closed at twelve and did not open again until a little before three. The interiors of the houses floated in a limbo of lethargy. In some it was so unbearable that people would hang theirhammocks in the courtyard or place chairs in the shade of the almond trees and sleep sitting up in the middle of the street. Only the hotel across from the station, with its bar and billiard room, and the telegraph office behind the church remained open. Everything was identical to my memories, but smaller and poorer, and leveled by a windstorm of fatality: the decaying houses themselves, the tinroofs perforated by rust, the levee with its crumbling granite benches and melancholy almond trees, and all of it transfigured by the invisible burning dust that deceived the eye and calcinated the skin. On the other side of the train tracks the private paradise of the banana company, stripped now of its electrified wire fence, was a vast thicketwith no palm trees, ruined houses among the poppies,and the rubble of the hospital destroyed by fire. There was not a single door, a crack in a wall, a human trace that did not find a supernatural resonance in me.
    My mother held herself very erect as she walked with her light step, almost not perspiring in her funereal dress, and in absolute silence, but her mortal pallor and sharpened profile revealed what was happening to her on the inside.At the end of the levee we saw the first human being: a tiny woman with an impoverished air who appeared at the corner of Jacobo Beracaza and walked beside us holding a small pewter pot whose ill-fitting lid marked the rhythm of her step. My mother whispered without looking at her:
    “It’s Vita.”
    I had recognized her. From the time she was a small girl she had worked in my grandparents’ kitchen,and no matter how much we had changed she would have recognized us if she had deigned to look at us. But no: she walked in another world. Even today I ask myself if Vita had not died long before that day.
    When we turned the corner, the dust burned my feet through the weave of my sandals. The feeling of being forsaken became unbearable. Then I saw myself and I saw my mother, just as I saw, whenI was a boy, the mother and sister of the thief whom María Consuegra had killed with a single shot one week earlier, when he tried to break into her house.
    At three in the morning the sound of someone trying to force the street door from the outside had wakened her. She got up without lighting the lamp, felt around in the armoire for an archaic revolver that no one had fired since the War ofa Thousand Days, and located in the darkness not only the place where the door was but also the exact height of the lock. Then she aimed the weapon with both hands, closed her eyes, and squeezed the trigger. She had never fired a gun before, but the shot hit its target through the door.
    He was the first dead person I had seen. When I passed by at seven in the morning on my way to school, thebody was still lying on the sidewalk in a patch of dried blood, the face destroyedby the lead that had shattered its nose and come out one ear. He was wearing a sailor’s T-shirt with colored stripes and ordinary trousers held up by a rope instead of a belt, and he was barefoot. At his side, on the ground, they found the homemade picklock with which he had tried to jimmy the lock.
    The town dignitariescame to María Consuegra’s house to offer her their condolences for having killed the thief. I went that night with Papalelo, and we found her sitting in an armchair from Manila that looked like an enormous wicker peacock, surrounded by the fervor of her friends who listened to the story she had repeated a thousand times. Everyone agreed with her that she had fired out of sheer fright. Itwas then that my grandfather asked her if she had heard anything after the shot, and she answered that first she had heard a great silence, then the metallic sound of the picklock