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

had justdiedin Santa Marta, where he had been taken with great urgency and in secret.
    The only one of my uncles who achieved public recognition was the oldest and the only Conservative, José María Valdeblánquez, who had been a senator of the Republic during the War of a Thousand Days and in that capacity was present at the signing of the Liberal surrender at the nearby farm in Neerlandia. Facing him, onthe side of the defeated, was his father.
    I believe that the essence of my nature and way of thinking I owe in reality to the women in the family and to the many in our service who ministered to my childhood. They had strong characters and tender hearts, and they treated me with the naturalness of the Earthly Paradise. Of the many I remember, Lucía was the only one who surprised me with her youthfulperversity when she took me to the alley of the toads and lifted her dress to her waist to show me her copper-colored thatch of hair. But what in reality attracted my attention was the patch of
pinta
that extended along her belly like a map of the world, with purple dunes and yellow oceans. The others seemed like archangels of purity: they changed their clothes in front of me, bathed me when theybathed, sat me on my chamber pot and sat on theirs facing me to relieve themselves of their secrets, their sorrows, their rancors, as if I did not understand, not realizing I knew everything because I tied up the loose ends that they themselves left dangling.
    Chon belonged to the servants and to the street. She had come from Barrancas with my grandparents when she was still a girl, had grownup in the kitchen but was assimilated into the family, and had been treated like a chaperoning aunt ever since her pilgrimage to the Province with my infatuated mother. In her final years she moved to her own room in the poorest part of town, simply because she wanted to, and lived by selling on the street, starting at dawn, balls of ground corn for
arepas,
and her peddler’s cry became familiarin the silence of the small hours: “Old Chon’s chilled dough …”
    She had a beautiful Indian color and always seemed nothing but skin and bones, and she went barefoot, wearing a white turbanand wrapped in starched sheets. Her pace was very slow as she walked down the middle of the street with an escort of tamed, silent dogs who advanced as they circled around her. In the end she became part ofthe town’s folklore. At a Carnival celebration someone appeared as Chon, with her sheets and her vendor’s cry, although they could not train a guard of dogs like hers. Her cry of “chilled dough” became so popular that it was the subject of an accordion players’ song. One ill-fated morning two wild dogs attacked hers, who defended themselves with so much ferocity that Chon fell to the ground witha fractured spine. She did not survive despite the numerous medical resources my grandfather provided for her.
    Another revealing memory from that time was when Matilde Armenta gave birth; she was a laundress who worked in the house when I was about six years old. I went into her room by mistake and found her naked and lying with her legs spread on a canvas bed, howling with pain, surrounded bya disordered and irrational band of midwives who had divided up her body among themselves to help her give birth with tremendous shouts. One wiped the sweat from her face with a damp towel, others held down her arms and legs and massaged her belly to speed up the birth. Santos Villero, impassive in the midst of the disorder, murmured prayers for a calm sea with closed eyes as she seemed to dig betweenthe thighs of the woman in labor. The heat was unbearable in the room filled with steam from the pots of boiling water they had brought in from the kitchen. I stayed in a corner, torn between fear and curiosity, until the midwife pulled out by the ankles something raw like an unborn calf with a bloody length of intestine hanging from its navel. Then one of the women discovered