THE FIRST THING Senora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha. She did not tell anyone, of course, since no one on that ancient ocean liner, overflowing with Italians from Buenos Aires returning to their native land for the first time since the war, would have understood. But at least it made her feel less alone, less frightened and remote, at seventy-two years of age and at a distance of eighteen days of heavy seas from her people and her home.
The lights on land had been visible since daybreak. The passengers had got up earlier than usual and put on new clothes, their hearts heavy with the uncertainties of going ashore, so that that last Sunday on board seemed to be the only real Sunday of the whole voyage. Senora Prudencia Linero was one of the very few who attended Mass. In contrast to the previous days, when she had walked around the ship in partial mourning, today she had put on a tunic of coarse brown burlap belted with the cord of St Francis, and rough leather sandals that did not resemble a pilgrim's only because they were too new. It was an advance payment: she had promised God that she would wear the full-length habit for the rest of her life if He blessed her with a trip to Rome to see the Supreme Pontiff, and she already considered the blessing granted. When Mass was over she lit a candle to the Holy Spirit in thanks for giving her the courage to endure the Caribbean storms, and she said a prayer for each of her nine children and fourteen grandchildren who at that moment were dreaming about her in the windy night in Riohacha.
When she went up on deck after breakfast, life on the ship had changed. Luggage was piled in the ballroom, along with all kinds of tourist trinkets the Italians had bought at the magic markets of the Antilles, and on the bar there was a macaque from Pernambuco in a wrought-iron cage. It was a brilliant morning in early August, a Sunday typical of those postwar summers when the light was a daily revelation, and the enormous ship inched along, wheezing like an invalid, through a filmy calm. The gloomy fortress of the Dukes of Anjou was just beginning to loom up on the horizon, but the passengers who had come on deck thought they recognised familiar places, and pointed at them without quite seeing them, shouting with joy in their southern dialects. Senora Prudencia Linero, who had made so many dear old friends on board, who had looked after children while their parents danced and even sewn a button on the first officer's tunic, suddenly found them all distant and changed. The communal spirit and warmth that helped her to survive her first homesickness in the stifling heat of the tropics had disappeared. The eternal loves of the high seas ended when the port came in sight. Senora Prudencia Linero, who was not familiar with the changeable nature of Italians, thought the problem lay not in other people's hearts but in her own, since she was the only one going among a crowd that was returning. Every voyage must be like this, she thought, suffering for the first time in her life the sharp pain of being an outsider, while she leaned on the railing and contemplated the vestiges of so many extinct worlds in the depths of the water. Suddenly, a very beautiful girl standing beside her startled her with a horrified shriek.
'Mamma mia,' she cried, pointing down. 'Look]'
It was a drowned man. Senora Prudencia Linero saw him floating face up, aimless, a mature, bald man of unusual natural dignity, with open, joyful eyes the colour of the sky at dawn. He wore full evening dress with a brocade waistcoat, patent-leather shoes and a fresh gardenia in his lapel. In his right hand he held a little square package wrapped in gift paper, and his pallid iron fingers were clenched around the ribbon, which was all he had found to hold on to at the moment of his death.
'He must have fallen from a wedding party,' said one of the ship's officers. 'It happens pretty often in these waters during the summer.'
It was a momentary vision, because just then they were entering the bay, and the passengers were distracted by less lugubrious subjects. But Senora Prudencia Linero continued to think about the drowned man, the poor drowned man, whose coat-tails rippled in their wake.
As soon as the ship sailed into the harbour, a decrepit tug came out to meet it and lead it by the nose through the wreckage of countless military craft destroyed during the war. The water turned to oil as the ship made its way past the rusting wrecks, and the heat became even fiercer than in Riohacha at two in the afternoon. On the other side of the narrow channel, the city, shining in the eleven o'clock sun, with all its chimerical palaces and ancient, painted shacks crowded together on the hills, came into view. Just then an unbearable stench rose from the disturbed seabed, which Senora Prudencia Linero recognised as the foul breath of rotting crabs.
As the ship was manoeuvred into place, the passengers, with great displays of delight, spotted their relatives in the turmoil on the quayside. Most of them were middle-aged matrons with flamboyant bosoms, suffocating in their mourning clothes, with the most beautiful and numerous children in the world, and small, diligent husbands of the immortal kind who read the newspaper after their wives and dress like stern notaries despite the heat.
In the midst of that carnival confusion, a very old man with a deeply miserable expression, wearing a beggar's overcoat, pulled fistfuls of new-born chicks from his pockets with both hands. In a moment they covered the quayside, crazed and cheeping, and it was only because they were magic that many survived and kept on running after being trampled by the crowd that was oblivious to the miracle. The wizard had placed his hat upside down on the ground, but nobody at the railing tossed him a single coin in charity.
Fascinated by the marvellous spectacle that seemed to be presented in her honour, for she was the only one who appreciated it, Senora Prudencia Linero was not aware of the exact moment when the gangplank was lowered and a human avalanche invaded the ship with the howling force of a pirate attack. Dazed by the wild jubilation and the rancid-onion smell of so many families in summer, shoved by gangs of porters fighting over the baggage, she felt in danger of suffering the same ignominious death that had threatened the little chicks on the quay. That was when she sat down on her wooden trunk with its painted tin corners and remained there undaunted, reciting a vicious circle of prayers against temptation and danger in the land of infidels. The first officer found her when the cataclysm had passed and she was the only one left in the bare saloon.
'Nobody's supposed to be here now,' the officer told her amiably enough. 'Can I help you with anything?'
'I have to wait for the consul,' she said.
That was true. Two days before she sailed, her eldest son had sent a telegram to the consul in Naples, who was a friend of his, asking him to meet his mother at the port and help her through the procedures for her journey on to Rome. He had told him the name of the ship and the time of its arrival, and that he would recognise her because she would be wearing the habit of St Francis when she came ashore. She was so certain about these arrangements that the first officer allowed her to wait a little longer, although it would soon be time for the crew's lunch, and they had already put the chairs on the tables and were washing down the decks with buckets of water. They had to shift her trunk several times in order not to wet it, but she moved without changing her expression or interrupting her prayers, until they took her out of the recreation rooms and left her sitting in the full sun among the lifeboats. That was where the first officer found her again a little before two, drowning in sweat inside her penitent's garb and hopelessly repeating the rosary because she was terrified and sad and it was all she could do not to cry.
'It's useless for you to keep praying,' said the officer, without his former amiability. 'Even God goes on holiday in August.'
He explained that at this time of year half of Italy was at the beach, especially on Sundays. In all likelihood the consul was not on vacation, given the nature of his responsibilities, but it was certain he would not open the office until Monday. The only reasonable thing was to go to a hotel
, get a good night's sleep, and telephone the consulate the next day; no doubt the number was in the phone book. Senora Prudencia Linero had no choice but to accept his advice, and the officer helped her through immigration and customs and the process of changing money, and put her in a taxi, with vague instructions that she be taken to a decent hotel.
The hearse-like, decrepit taxi lurched down the deserted streets. For a moment Senora Prudencia Linero thought she and the driver were the only living creatures in a city of ghosts hanging from clotheslines in the middle of the street, but she also thought that a man who talked so much, and with so much passion, could not have time to harm a poor solitary woman who had risked the dangers of the ocean to see the Pope.
At the end of the labyrinth of streets she saw the sea again. The taxi continued to lurch along beside a burning, deserted beach where there were numerous small hotels painted in bright colors. It did not stop at any of these but drove straight to the least gaudy one, which stood in a public garden with large palm trees and green benches. The driver placed the trunk on the shaded pavement, and when he saw Senora Prudencia Linero's hesitation, assured her that this was the most decent hotel in Naples.
A handsome, kind-hearted porter hoisted the trunk on his shoulder and took charge of her. He led her to a metal grillwork lift that had been improvised in the stairwell, and with alarming determination began to sing a Puccini aria at the top of his voice. It was an ancient building, with a different hotel on each of its nine renovated floors. Suddenly, in a kind of hallucination, Senora Prudencia Linero felt that she was in a chicken cage rising slowly through the centre of an echoing marble staircase, and catching people in the house unawares, with their most intimate doubts and fears, with their torn underwear and acidic belches. On the third floor the lift jolted to a halt, and then the porter stopped singing, opened the sliding rhomboids of the door, and with a gallant bow indicated to Senora Prudencia Linero that she should consider herself at home.
In the foyer she saw shade plants in copper pots and a languid adolescent behind a wooden counter encrusted with coloured glass. She liked him at once because he had the same angelic ringlets as her youngest grandson. She liked the name of the hotel, with its letters engraved on a bronze plaque, she liked the smell of carbolic, she liked the hanging ferns, the silence, the golden fleurs-de-lis on the wallpaper. Then she stepped out of the lift, and her heart sank. A group of English tourists wearing shorts and beach sandals were dozing in a long row of easy chairs. There were seventeen of them, seated symmetrically, as if they were one man repeated over and over again in a hall of mirrors. Senora Prudencia Linero took them in at a single glance without distinguishing one from the other, and all that struck her was the long row of pink knees that looked like slabs of pork hanging from hooks in a butcher's shop. She did not take another step towards the counter, but retreated in consternation into the lift.
'Let's go to another floor,' she said.
'This is the only one that has a dining-room, signora,' said the porter.
'It doesn't matter,' she said.
The porter made a gesture of consent, closed the lift doors, and sang the remaining part of the song until they came to the hotel on the fifth floor. Everything seemed more relaxed here: the owner was a youthful matron who spoke fluent Spanish, and no one was taking a siesta in the easy chairs in the foyer. It was true there was no dining-room, but the hotel had arranged with a nearby restaurant to serve the guests at a reduced price. And so Senora Prudencia Linero decided yes, she would stay for one night, persuaded as much by the owner's eloquence and amiability as by her relief that not a single Englishman with pink knees was sleeping in the foyer.
It was two in the afternoon and the blinds in the room were closed. The half-shadow preserved the coolness and silence of a secret glade, and it was a good place to cry. As soon as she was alone, Senora Prudencia Linero drew both the bolts, and for the first time since the morning she urinated, in a thin, hesitant stream that allowed her to recover the identity she had lost during the journey. Then she removed her sandals and the cord around her waist, and lay down on her left side on a double bed that was too wide and too lonely just for her, and released the other flood, of long-overdue tears.
Not only was this the first time she had left Riohacha, it was one of the few times she had left her house since her children had married and moved away, and she was left alone with two barefoot Indian women to care for the soulless body of her husband. Half her life had been spent in the bedroom facing the ruins of the only man she had ever loved, who for almost thirty years had lain in a coma, stretched on a goatskin mattress on the bed of their youthful lovemaking. The previous October, the invalid had opened his eyes in a sudden flash of lucidity, recognised his family, and asked them to send for a photographer. They brought in the old man from the park with the enormous bellows and black-sleeve camera and the magnesium plate for taking pictures at home. The sick man himself arranged the photographs. 'One for Prudencia, for the love and happiness she has given me in my life,' he said. This was taken with the first magnesium flash. 'Now another two for my darling daughters, Prudencita and Natalia,' he said. These were taken. 'Another two for my sons, whose affection and good sense make them examples to the family,' he said. And so on until the photographer ran out of paper and had to go home for a new supply. At four o'clock, when the magnesium smoke and the noisy crowd of relatives, friends and acquaintances who flocked in to get their copies of the portrait made the air in the bedroom impossible to breathe, the invalid began to lose consciousness in his bed, and he waved good-bye to everyone as if he were erasing himself from the world at the railing of a ship.
His death was not the relief for the widow that everyone had expected. On the contrary, she was so grief-stricken that her children got together to find out what they could do to comfort her, and she replied that all she wanted was to go to Rome to meet the Pope.
'I'll go alone and wear the habit of St Francis,' she informed them. 'I've made a vow.'
The only gratification she had left from those years of vigil was the pleasure of crying. On the ship, when she had to share her cabin with two Clarissine sisters who went ashore at Marseilles, she would linger in the bathroom to cry without being seen. So the hotelroom in Naples was the only place she had found since leaving Riohacha where she could cry to her heart's content. And she would have cried until the following day, when the train left for Rome, if the owner had not knocked at her door at seven to say that if she did not go to the restaurant soon she would have nothing to eat.
The porter accompanied her. A cool breeze had begun to blow in from the sea, and there were still some bathers on the beach under the pale seven o'clock sun. Senora Prudencia Linero followed the porter through a difficult terrain of steep, narrow streets that were just beginning to wake from their Sunday siesta, and then found herself under the shade of a canopy of vines where there were tables covered with red-checkered cloths and jars serving as improvised vases for paper flowers. At that early hour her only fellow diners were the waiters and waitresses and a very poor priest eating bread and onions at a back table. When she went in she felt everyone's eyes on her brown habit, but this did not affect her, for she knew that ridicule was part of her penance. The waitress, on the other hand, roused a spark of pity in her, because she was blonde and beautiful and spoke as if she were singing, and Senora Prudencia Linero thought that things must be very bad in Italy after the war if a girl like her had to wait on tables in a restaurant. But she felt at ease in the flowery arbour, and the aroma from the kitchen of stew with bay leaf awakened the hunger deferred by the anxieties of the day. For the first time in a long while she had no desire to cry.
And yet she could not eat as she wished, partly because it was difficult to communicate with the blonde waitress, even though she was kind and patient, and partly because some little songbirds, the kind kept in cages in the houses of Riohacha, were the only meat available. The priest eating in the corner, who later acted as interpreter, tried to make her understand that in Europe wartime shortages were still not over, and the fact that at least there were little woodland birds to eat ought to be viewed as a miracle. But she pushed them away.
'To me,' she said, 'it would be like eating one of my children.'
And so she had to settle for some vermicelli soup, a plate of marrow boiled with a few shreds of rancid bacon, and a piece of bread as hard as marble. While she was eating, the priest approached her table to ask her, in the name of charity, to buy him a cup of coffee, and he sat down with her. He was from Yugoslavia but had been a missionary in Bolivia, and spoke awkward, idiomatic Spanish. To Senora Prudencia Linero he seemed an ordinary man without a trace of God's indulgence, and she observed that he had coarse hands with broken, dirty nails, and an onion breath so persistent it seemed more like a character trait. But he was in the service of God, after all, and it was also a pleasure, when she was so far from home, to meet someone she could talk to.
They conversed at their leisure, oblivious to the heavy barnyard noises that began to surround them as more people sat down at the other tables. Senora Prudencia Linero had already formed a decisive opinion of Italy: she did not like it. And not because the men were somewhat improper, which was saying a great deal, or because they ate songbirds, which was going too far, but because of their bad habit of leaving drowned men to drift in the water.
The priest, who had ordered a grappa at her expense along with the coffee, tried to make her see how superficial a judgement this was. For during the war they had established a very efficient service for rescuing, identifying and burying in holy ground the many victims of drowning found floating in the bay of Naples.
'Centuries ago,' the priest concluded, 'the Italians learned that there is only one life, and they try to live it as best they can. This has made them calculating and fickle, but it has also cured them of cruelty.'
'They didn't even stop the ship,' she said.
'What they do is radio the port authorities,' said the priest. 'By now they've picked him up and given him a proper burial.'
The discussion changed both their moods. Senora Prudencia Linero had finished eating, and only then did she realise that all the tables were occupied. At the ones close by, almost naked tourists sat eating in silence, among them a few pairs of lovers who kissed instead of eating. At the tables in the rear, near the bar, local people were playing dice and drinking a colourless wine. Senora Prudencia Linero realised that she had only one reason for being in such an unsavoury country.
'Do you think it will be very difficult to see the Pope?' she asked.
The priest replied that nothing was easier in the summer. The Pope was on holiday in Castelgandolfo, and on Wednesday afternoons he held a public audience for pilgrims from all over the world. The entrance fee was very low: twenty lire.
'And how much does he charge to hear a person's confession?' she asked.
'The Holy Father does not hear confessions,' said the priest, somewhat scandalised, 'except those of kings, of course.'
'I don't see why he would refuse a poor woman who's come so far,' she said.
'And some kings, even though they're kings, have died waiting,' said the priest. 'Tell me, though: yours must be an awful sin if you've made a journey like that all alone just to confess to the Holy Father.'
Senora Prudencia Linero thought for a moment, and the priest saw her smile for the first time.
'Mother of God]' she said. 'It'd be enough just to see him.' And she added, with a sigh that seemed to come from her soul: 'It's been my lifelong dream]'
The truth was that she still felt frightened and sad, and all she wanted was to leave immediately, leave not only the restaurant but Italy as well. The priest must have thought he had got all he could from the deluded woman, so he wished her good luck and went to another table to ask whether, in the name of charity, they would buy him a cup of coffee.
When she walked out of the restaurant, Senora Prudencia Linero found the city changed. She was surprised by the sunlight at nine o'clock, and startled by the raucous throng that had invaded the streets for the cool of the evening breeze. The backfiring of so many crazed Vespas was unbearable. They were driven by bare-chested men with beautiful women sitting behind them, hugging them around the waist, and they moved in fits and starts, weaving in and out among hanging pigs and tables piled with watermelons.
It was a carnival atmosphere, but it seemed appalling to Senora Prudencia Linero. She lost her way, and suddenly found herself in an insalubrious street where silent women were sitting in the doorways of identical houses whose blinking red lights made her shiver with fear. A well-dressed man wearing a heavy gold ring and a diamond in his tie followed her for several blocks saying something in Italian, and then in English and French. When he received no reply, he showed her a postcard from a packet he took out of his pocket, and one glance was all she needed to feel that she was walking through hell.
She fled in utter terror, and at the end of the street she found the twilight sea again and the same stink of rotting shellfish as in the port of Riohacha, and her heart returned to its rightful place. She recognised the painted hotels along the deserted beach, the funereal taxis, the diamond of the first star in the immense sky. At the far end of the bay, she recognised the ship on which she had arrived, solitary and enormous at the quay, lights blazing on every deck, and realised it no longer had anything to do with her life. She turned left at the corner but could not go any further because of a crowd of people being held at bay by a squad of carabinieri. A row of ambulances was waiting with open doors outside her hotel building.
Standing on tiptoe and peering over the shoulders of the onlookers, Senora Prudencia Linero saw the English tourists again. They were being carried out on stretchers, one by one, each motionless and dignified; in the more formal clothing they had put on for supper - flannel trousers, diagonally striped ties and dark jackets with the Trinity College coat of arms embroidered on the breast pocket - they still seemed to be one man repeated many times over. As they were brought out, the neighbours watching from their balconies and the people held back on the street counted them in chorus, like a crowd in a stadium. There were seventeen. They were put in the ambulances, two by two, and driven away with a wail of wartime sirens.
Dazed by so many stupefying events, Senora Prudencia Linero went up in the lift, which was packed with guests from the other hotels, all speaking impenetrable languages. They got off at every floor except the third, which was open and lit, but no one was at the counter or in the easy chairs in the foyer where she had seen the pink knees of the seventeen sleeping Englishmen. The owner on the fifth floor commented on the disaster with uncontrolled excitement.
'They're all dead,' she told Senora Prudencia Linero in Spanish. 'Poisoned by the oyster soup at supper. Just imagine, oysters in August]'
She handed her the key to her room, and paid no further attention to her as she said to the other guests in her own dialect, 'Since there's no dining-room here, everyone who goes to sleep wakes up alive]' With another knot of tears in her throat, Senora Prudencia Linero drew the bolts in her room. After that she pushed the little writing-table, the easy chair and finally her trunk against the door, to form a secure barricade against the horrors of a country where so many things happened at the same time. Then she put on her widow's nightgown, lay down on her back in the bed, and said seventeen rosaries for the eternal rest of the souls of the seventeen poisoned Englishmen.
STRANGE PILGRIMS - GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
Gabriel Gárcia Márquez
Gabriel José García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, a town in Northern Colombia, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents in a house filled with countless aunts and the rumors of ghosts. But in order to get a better grasp on García Márquez's life, it helps to understand something first about both the history of Colombia and the unusual background of his family.
