Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman

house, but its details remained foggy. My mother, who had just turned three, always rememberedit as an improbable dream. In front of me the adults would complicate the story to confuse me, and I never could assemble the complete puzzle because everyone, on both sides, would place the pieces in their own way. The most reliable version was that Medardo Pacheco’s mother had provoked him into avenging her honor, which had been offended by a base remark attributed to my grandfather. He deniedit, saying it was a lie, and gave public explanations to those who had been offended, but Medardo Pacheco persisted in his ill will and then moved from offended to offender with a serious insult to my grandfather concerning his conduct as a Liberal. I never found out what it was. His honor wounded, my grandfather challenged him to a fight to the death, without a fixed date.
    An exemplary indicationof the colonel’s nature was the time he allowed to pass between the challenge and the duel. He arranged his affairs with absolute discretion in order to guarantee his family’s security in the only choice destiny offered him: death or prison. He began by selling without haste the little he had to live on after the last war: the goldsmith’s workshop and a small farm he had inherited from his father,where he raised goats for slaughter and cultivated a field of sugarcane. After six months he put the money he had gotten at the back of a closetand waited in silence for the day he himself had chosen: October 12, 1908, the anniversary of the discovery of America.
    Medardo Pacheco lived on the outskirts of town, but my grandfather knew he could not miss the procession of the Virgen del Pilar thatafternoon. Before he went out to find him, he wrote a brief, tender letter to his wife in which he told her where he had hidden his money and gave her some final instructions concerning the children’s future. He placed it under the pillow they shared, where his wife no doubt would find it when she lay down to sleep, and with no goodbyes of any kind he went out to the encounter with his evil hour.
    Even the least valid versions agree that it was a typical Monday in a Caribbean October, with a sad rain, low clouds, and a funereal wind. Medardo Pacheco, dressed for Sunday, had just entered a dead-end alley when Colonel Márquez waylaid him. Both were armed. Years later, in her lunatic ramblings, my grandmother would say: “God gave Nicolasito the opportunity to pardon the life of that poor man,but he didn’t know how to take it.” Perhaps she thought this because the colonel told her he had seen a flash of regret in the eyes of his adversary, who had been taken by surprise. He also told her that when the enormous body, as big as a ceiba tree, collapsed into the underbrush it emitted a wordless sob, “like a wet kitten.” Oral tradition attributed a rhetorical sentence to Papalelo at themoment he turned himself in to the mayor: “The bullet of honor conquered the bullet of power.” It is a sentence faithful to the Liberal style of the time, but I have not been able to reconcile it with my grandfather’s temperament. The truth is there were no witnesses. An authorized version would have been the legal testimony of my grandfather and his contemporaries from both factions, but if thereever was a file of documents, not even its shadow remains. Of the numerous versions I have heard so far, I have not found two that agreed.
    The incident divided the families in town, even the dead man’s. One side proposed avenging him, while the others took Tranquilina Iguarán and her children into their houses until the danger of retaliation subsided. These details made sostrong an impressionon me in my childhood that I not only assumed the weight of ancestral guilt as if it were my own, but even now, as I write this, I feel more compassion for the dead man’s family than for my own.
    Papalelo was moved to Riohacha for greater safety, and then to Santa Marta, where he was