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

they were the emissaries of Divine Providence. Their image became so hateful that after the ferocious repression of thebananastrikes by soldiers from the interior, we called men in the military not soldiers but Cachacos. We viewed them as the sole beneficiaries of political power, and many of them behaved as if that were true. Only in this way can one explain the horror of the “Black Night of Aracataca,” a legendary slaughter with such uncertain traces in popular memory that there is no certain evidence it everreally happened.
    It began on a Saturday worse than the others when a respectable townsman whose identity did not pass into history went into a tavern to ask for a glass of water for a little boy whose hand he was holding. A stranger drinking alone at the bar wanted to force the boy to take a drink of rum instead of water. The father tried to stop him, but the stranger persisted until the frightenedboy knocked over his drink without meaning to. Without hesitation, the stranger shot him dead.
    It was another of the phantoms of my childhood. Papalelo would often remind me of it when we entered the taverns together to have a cold drink, but in a manner so unreal that not even he seemed to believe the story. It must have happened soon after he came to Aracataca, since my mother remembered itonly because of the horror it caused in the adults. The only thing known about the aggressor was that he spoke with the affected accent of the Andeans, so that the town’s reprisals were directed not only against him but any of the numerous despised strangers who spoke with that same accent. Bands of natives armed with harvesting machetes poured into the streets in the dark, seized the invisible shapethey took by surprise in the gloom, and ordered:
    “Speak!”
    Only because of his diction they hacked him to pieces, not taking into account the impossibility of being accurate when there were so many different ways of speaking. Don Rafael Quintero Ortega, the husband of my aunt Wenefrida Márquez and the most boastful and beloved of Cachacos, was about to celebrate his hundredth birthday becausemy grandfather had locked him in a pantry until tempers had cooled.
    Family misfortunes reached their culmination after two years of living in Aracataca with the death of Margarita MaríaMiniata, who was the light of the house. For years her daguerreotype hung in the living room, and her name has been repeated from one generation to the next as another of the many indications of family identity.Recent generations do not seem moved by that princess with the shirred skirts, little white boots, and a braid hanging down to her waist, which they will never make consonant with the rhetorical image of a great-grandmother, but I have the impression that beneath the weight of remorse and frustrated hopes for a better world, that state of perpetual alarm was the one that most resembled peace formy grandparents. Until their deaths they continued feeling like strangers no matter where they were.
    They were, to be precise, but in the crowds the train brought to us from the world, it was difficult to make immediate distinctions. With the same impulse as my grandparents and their progeny, the Fergussons, the Duráns, the Beracazas, the Dacontes, the Correas had also come in search of a betterlife. In turbulent avalanches Italians, Canary Islanders, Syrians—whom we called Turks—continued to arrive, filtering through the borders of the Province in search of freedom and other ways of living that they had lost in their homelands. They were of every condition and class. Some were escapees from Devils Island—the French penal colony in the Guianas—persecuted more for their ideas than forcommon crimes. One of them, René Belvenoit, a French journalist condemned for political reasons, was a fugitive in the banana region and wrote a masterful book about the horrors of his captivity. Thanks to all of them—good and bad—Aracataca was from the beginning a