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

sentenced to a year in prison: the first half in solitary and the second half in the general population. As soonas he was free he traveled with the family for a brief time to the town of Ciénaga, then to Panama, where he had another daughter with a casual lover, and at last to the unhealthy and unwelcoming jurisdiction of Aracataca and a job as a tax collector for the departmental office of finance. Never again was he armed on the street, even in the worst times of the banana violence, and he kept his revolverunder the pillow only to defend the house.
    Aracataca was very far from being the still water they had dreamed of after the nightmare of Medardo Pacheco. It was born as a Chimila Indian settlement and entered history on its left foot as a remote district without God or law in the municipality of Ciénaga, more debased than enriched by the banana fever. It bears the name not of a town but of a river:
Ara
in the Chimila language, and
Cataca,
the word with which the community recognized its leader. Therefore we natives do not call it Aracataca but use its correct name: Cataca.
    When my grandfather tried to awaken the family’s enthusiasm with the fantasy that the streets were paved with gold there, Mina had said: “Money is the devil’s dung.” For my mother it was the kingdom of all terrors. Theearliest one she remembered was the plague of locusts that devastated the fields while she was still very young. “You could hear them pass like a wind of stones,” she told me when we went to sell the house. The terrorized residents had to entrench themselves in their rooms, and the scourge could be defeated only by the arts of witchcraft.
    In any season we would be surprised by dry hurricanesthat blew the roofs off houses and attacked the new banana crop and left the town covered in astral dust. In summer terrible droughts vented their rage on the cattle, or in winter immeasurablerains fell that turned the streets into turbulent rivers. The gringo engineers navigated in rubber boats among drowned mattresses and dead cows. The United Fruit Company, whose artificial systems of irrigationwere responsible for the unrestrained waters, diverted the riverbed when the most serious of the floods unearthed the bodies in the cemetery.
    The most sinister of the plagues, however, was the human one. A train that looked like a toy flung onto the town’s burning sands a leaf storm of adventurers from all over the world who took control of the streets by force of arms. The sudden prosperitybrought with it excessive population growth and extreme social disorder. It was only five leagues away from the Buenos Aires penal colony, on the Fundación River, whose inmates would escape on weekends to play at terrorizing Aracataca. From the time the palm and reed huts of the Chimilas began to be replaced by the wooden houses of the United Fruit Company, with their sloping tin roofs, burlap windows,and outhouses adorned with vines of dusty flowers, we resembled nothing so much as the raw towns in western movies. In the midst of that blizzard of unknown faces, of tents on public thoroughfares and men changing their clothes in the street, of women sitting on trunks with their parasols opened and mules and mules and mules dying of hunger in the hotel’s stables, those who had arrived firstbecame the last. We were the eternal outsiders, the newcomers.
    The killings were not only because of Saturday brawls. One afternoon we heard shouts in the street and saw a headless man ride past on a donkey. He had been decapitated by a machete during the settling of accounts on the banana plantations, and his head had been carried away by the icy waters of the irrigation ditch. That night Iheard my grandmother give her usual explanation: “Only a Cachaco could do something so horrible.”
    Cachacos were natives of the altiplano, and we distinguished them from the rest of humanity not only by their languid manners and depraved diction but by their presumption that