Living to Tell the Tale Read Online Free PDF

falling on the cement, and then a faint, anguished voice: “Mother, help me!” María Consuegra, it seemed, had not been conscious of this heartbreaking lament until my grandfather asked her the question. Only then did sheburst into tears.
    This happened on a Monday. On Tuesday of the following week, during siesta, I was playing tops with Luis Carmelo Correa, my oldest friend in life, when we were surprised by the sleepers waking before it was time and looking out the windows. Then we saw in the deserted street a woman dressed in strict mourning and a girl about twelve years old who was carrying a bouquet of fadedflowers wrapped in newspaper. They protected themselves from the burning sun with a black umbrella and were quite oblivious to the effrontery of the people who watched them pass by. They were the mother and younger sister of the dead thief, bringing flowers for his grave.
    That vision pursued me for many years, like a single dream that the entire town watched through its windows as it passed,until I managed to exorcise it in a story. But the truth is that I did not become aware of the drama of the woman and the girl, or their imperturbable dignity, until the day I went with my mother to sell the house and surprised myself walking down the same deserted street at the same lethal hour.
    “I feel as if I were the thief,” I said.
    My mother did not understand me. In fact, when we passedthe house of María Consuegra she did not even glance at the door where you could still see the patched bullet hole in the wood. Years later, recalling that trip with her, I confirmed that she did remember the tragedy but would have given her soul to forget it. This was even more evident when we passed the house where Don Emilio, better known as the Belgian, had lived, a veteran of the First WorldWar who had lost the use of both legs in a minefield in Normandy and who, one Pentecostal Sunday, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide. I was no older than six, but I remember as if it were yesterday the upheaval this news caused at seven in the morning. It was so memorable that when we returned to the town to sell the house, my mother at last broke her silenceafter twenty years.
    “The poor Belgian,” she said with a sigh, “just as you said, and he never played chess again.”
    Our intention was to go straight to the house. But when we were no more than a block away, my mother stopped without warning and turned the corner.
    “It’s better if we go this way,” she said. And since I wanted to know why, she answered: “Because I’m afraid.”
    This was how I learnedthe reason for my nausea: it was fear, not only of confronting my ghosts but fear of everything. And so we walked down a parallel street, making a detour whose only purpose was to avoid passing our house. “I wouldn’t have had the courage to see it without talking to somebody first,” my mother would tell me afterward. That is what she did. Almost dragging me along, she walked unannounced intothe pharmacy of Dr. Alfredo Barboza, a corner house less than a hundred paces from ours.
    Adriana Berdugo, the pharmacist’s wife, was so absorbed in working at her primitive hand-cranked Domestic sewing machine that she did not know my mother was standing in front of her; my mother said, almost in a whisper:
    “Comadre.”
    Adriana looked up, her eyes rarefied by the thick lenses ofthe farsighted,then she took off her glasses, hesitated for a moment, and jumped up with a sob, her arms open wide:
    “Ay, Comadre!”
    My mother was already behind the counter, and without saying anything else they embraced and wept. I stood watching them from the other side of the counter, not knowing what to do, shaken by the certainty that this long embrace with its silent tears was something irreparable thatwas happening forever in my own life.
    The pharmacy had been the leading one in the days of the banana company, but all that was left of the old bottles