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

remaining places were occupiedfirst by the men and then by the women, but never at the same time. These rules were broken during the July 20 patriotic holiday, and lunch by shifts lasted until everyone had eaten. At night the table was not laid, but large cups of café con leche were given out in the kitchen, along with my grandmother’s exquisite pastries. When the doors were closed, people hung their hammocks where they could,at different levels, even from the trees in the courtyard.
    I lived one of the great fantasies of those years one day when a group of men came to the house, dressed alike in gaiters and spurs, and all of them with a cross of ash drawn on their foreheads. They were the sons fathered by the colonel across the entire length of the Province during the War of a Thousand Days, and they had come fromtheir towns almost a month late to congratulate him on his birthday. Before coming to the house they had heard Ash Wednesday Mass, and the cross that Father Angarita drew on their foreheads seemed like a supernatural emblem whose mystery would pursue me for years, even after I became familiar with the liturgy of Holy Week.
    Most of them had been born after my grandparents’ marriage. After shehad heard of their births, Mina wrote their first and family names in a notebook, and in the end, with an awkward indulgence, she included them with all her heart in the family records. But neither she nor anyone else found it easy to distinguish one from the other before that memorable visit, when each of them revealed his peculiar nature. They were serious and hardworking, family men, peaceablepeople, yet not afraid to lose their heads in the vertigo of drunken revelry. They broke dishes, trampled rosebushes chasing a calf in orderto toss it in a blanket, shot chickens for the stew, and set loose a greased pig that ran over the women embroidering in the hallway, but no one lamented these mishaps because of the gusts of joy they brought with them.
    With some frequency I continued tosee Esteban Carrillo, Aunt Elvira’s twin brother, who was skilled in the manual arts and traveled with a toolbox for making repairs as a favor in the houses he visited. With his sense of humor and good memory he filled in numerous gaps in the family history that had seemed impassable to me. In my adolescence I also visited my uncle Nicolás Gómez, an intense blond with reddish freckles who alwaysheld in very high esteem his respectable trade as a shopkeeper in the former penal colony at Fundación. Struck by my excellent reputation as a lost cause, he would say goodbye to me with a well-stocked shopping bag for my journey. Rafael Arias always arrived in a hurry on his way to somewhere else, on the back of a mule and in riding clothes, with only enough time to drink a cup of coffee standingin the kitchen. I found the others scattered among the towns in the Province on the nostalgic trips I made later to write my first novels, and I always missed the cross of ash on their foreheads as an incontrovertible sign of family identity.
    Years after my grandparents had died and the family manor had been abandoned to its fate, I came to Fundación on the night train and sat at the only foodstand open at that hour in the station. There was little left to eat, but the owner improvised a nice dish in my honor. She was witty and obliging, and behind these gentle virtues I thought I could detect the strong character of the women in the tribe. I confirmed this years later: the good-looking proprietor was Sara Noriega, another of my unknown aunts.
    Apolinar, the small, solid former slavewhom I always recalled as an uncle, disappeared from the house for years, and one afternoon he reappeared for no reason, dressed in mourning in a black suit and an enormous black hat pulled down to his melancholy eyes. As he passed through the kitchen he said that he had come for the funeral, but no one understood him until the next day, when the news arrived that my grandfather