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Feeding The Sharks

Recently I've been reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez' autobiography Living To Tell The Tale and I've been intoxicated by his tale of Colombia during the banana boom and of his vast extended family. Colombia and my fascinationwith my familial roots also shape some of my own writing I feel, though I'm not sure why I feel the need to point it out, after all, all writers are merely sponges, soaking up everything that happens around them are regurgitating them anew in a web of countless new stories and intrigues.

I can stare endlessly at photos of myself. Not in a narcissit way (Far from it, once upon a time I was full of self loathing, something I'm glad to say I've largely overcome) but it fascinates me to have a visual chronical of the passing of time. Even more fascinating perhaps are the photos which reveal a time before I even existed. I love that the first photo in my baby album is of my pregnant mother.

In my sister’s room there is a little black and white photo of Mami, Tia Nury, Tia Lilia and Tio Ricardo as children. It is a picture that draws me in, a window into another world, another time.

When we were children Mami would always tell Liz and I stories of her childhood and we’d sit spellbound at the bottom of the bed, envious of her adventures. I went to Mami’s room taking the photo with me. Ironically she was reading Love in the Time of Cholera. She smiled fondly at the picture, though not without a small glint of sadness at seeing Lilia. I sat on the bed, folded my hands in my lap and asked as if I were six years old again "Tell me about your childhood please."

"You children are so lucky you know." She started, "We didn’t even have a fridge. Can you believe that?" She laughed almost as if she didn’t believe it herself, "Mami would always make caldo for breakfast or if not, we just had bread and agua de panela. Papi used to work the railways and if he saw us on the way to school, he’d give us ice cubes. That was always such a treat. We didn’t have running water in the house, we had to go outside and pump it. Look you can see the pump in the picture. You’ve seen the old house haven’t you?"

I nodded, often would be the time when we were in Macondo, she’d point to an ugly cream and brown painted building with a rusty tin roof and tell us that was the house she’d been born in. It was on the outskirts of the village, beyond the railway on a street that wasn’t paved, merely a path born of feet treading the volcanic ash and mud.

"Mami always used to dress us so nicely. She was good friends with Doña Alicia, the village seamstress." I nodded my head remembering meeting the Doña as a child, her shop looking out onto the burnt railway tracks and inside rolls of material and a pet parrot that called out 'Buenas' whenever a customer walked in. "I remember my First Communion dress and I felt like a princess. It was so beautifully made. Look at the photo, afterwards Doña Alicia cut mine and Nury’s dresses into Sunday wear and made that dress for Liliana with the left over material.

"I learnt how to sew because of Doña Alicia. She would pay me half a peso a week to sweep up her shop, and she would send me on errands to buy her buttons. I would sit in the shop and watch her work away, and that’s how I learnt. When I was about nine years old she invited me to come on holiday with her. She was paying so my parents had no reason to say no. I think I wore that dress when we went. We took the train to Medellin and I was so sick, it took us about sixteen hours to get there. All I could eat was melon and I was still sick all the time. Then we went all around the Caribbean coast, Santa Marta, Barranquilla, Cartegena. In Cartegena the train literally went to the ocean. The waves crashed around us so strongly, we didn’t know you would get drenched sitting on the train, didn’t know the waves could reach us. Then the train would just stop because there was nowhere else to go without driving into the sea. It was a little cliff and you could stand on the edge and throw meat to the sharks!"

I breathed in awe at this, I didn’t remember hearing this story as a child. "Weren’t you scared?" I asked. She shook her head "Not really. I was always fascinated by the animals. Imagine we had no television in those days so I only knew about sharks from books. Now I could see them jumping out of the water for real and it was so amazing." I smiled delighted at her childlike awe in remembering the story, losing myself in imagination too, the colourful picture of fearsome sharks dancing on the waves, beneath a train that stopped on the edge of the world, drenched in the Caribbean sunlight.

"It was really my only holiday around Colombia." She continued ."I enjoyed it seeing all the places, learning all the history. We saw the place where Simon Bolivar died, after his journey across the Rio Magdalena. Even though I was very sick from the train ride through the Andes it was still fun."

She got off the bed. "Wait there" and she went downstairs, then returned with a hitherto unknown to me, photo album. I looked on in wonder at pictures I was seeing for the first time, of familiar faces long before the maturity of time. Laughed out loud at a picture of my namesake Tio Jaime, with his long sideburns and 1970s moustache.

"You know of course I went to Bogotá to live with Jaime when I was about ten? I remember the day I left Macondo, my Godmother, who was the wife of the chemist gave me a beautiful necklace made from emeralds. I remember thinking it was too nice a gift to give to a ten year old girl. Christina and Humberto came to live with us for a while too. They got married one Tuesday morning and only told us afterwards. Christina was pregnant with Elvira. She didn’t really like the city that much and they were only there because of Humberto’s job. As soon as they could, they went back to Macondo. Elvira and Elizabeth were both born around the same time."

Turned the pages of the photo album and Mami was quiet for a while, staring at a picture of Liliana. She looked so young, still as always with that flowing long hair. I still can’t believe sometimes that she and the girls are gone. I kept quiet too, to let Mami find her words again.

"The first and only time Lilia smoked a cigarette in her life was the day before she got married to Pacho." She pointed to a picture of a group of the women in my family, Lilia with the cigarette between her fingers. Gineth, Laudiz, Mirna all grown up now with children of their own, little more than children themselves in the picture. "That’s Cecilia, one of Mami’s cousins. She’s dead now too."

Mami turned the page, more wedding photos. She started laughing. "I never forget the first time your father meet mine. I had taught him every single phrase he would have to deal with 'Hola, Como Estas, Como La Ido, Come La Va, Que Mas, Que Haces'. All of them. Then when they met, Papi said "Que tal Joven?" Your father turned to me with no understanding, 'Que tal' was the only one I forgot to tell him!"

I think of my youngest cousin, Maria Jose, just over a year old now and I smile to think that I can show her photos of her father as a grubby faced three year old, with curly hair and mischievous eyes.

Perhaps one day I can sit down with my own children, open that photo album and point to their Grandmother and say "See that bump? That's me that is."

By Cockney Colombian on Jun 20, 2005, 01:23 in Friendly Talkzone.

dwmte says on Jun 20, 2005, 04:30:

que tal, hombre.... buen reminencias (sp)...gracias...

i really ride on your stories. they bring to mind/light the colombia in el campo i know and love so dearly.

tales of pueblos in eastern antioquia where we would go 'pilon' hunting. where the 'west' was as wild as can be and the gun of choice wasn't a six-shooter, but a fifty shooter. where the wild guys were of the type characterized in 'romancing the stone' and the pool table in the funky salon de billiares sat on an uneaven earthen floor and the balls had to be held to keep them in one place. where, still, water is brought by jack pump to the surface of the earth, and shitters are as often as not, an outhouse.

thanks again, friend.

dw

0 funny, 0 helpful.

Cockney Colombian says on Jun 24, 2005, 13:03:

Mi Abuela's sister lived in a isolated farm in the middle of nowhere hidden by a forest of sugar cane.

She had satalite TV but no toilet!

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