“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 by a 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 between the 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 me in the corner and dragged me from the room. “You’re in mortal sin,” she said. And ordered with a menacing finger: “Don’t think again about what you saw.” On the other hand, the woman who in reality took away my innocence did not intend to and never knew she had. Her name was Trinidad, she was the daughter of someone who worked in the house, and one fatal spring she began to blossom. She was thirteen but still used the dresses she had worn when she was nine, and they were so tight to her body that she seemed more naked than if she had been undressed. One night we were alone in the courtyard, band music erupted without warning from the house next door and Trinidad began to dance with me, and she held me so tight she took my breathe away. I do not know what became of her, but even today I wake up in the middle of the night agitated by the upheaval, and I know I could recognize her in the dark by the touch of every inch of her skin and her animal odor. In an instant I became conscious of my body with a clarity of instincts that I have never felt again, and that I dare to recall as an exquisite death. After that I knew in a confused and illusory fashion that there was an unfathomable mystery I did not know but that agitated me as if I did. The women of the family, however, always led me along the arid path of chastity. The loss of innocence taught me at the same time that it was not Baby Jesus who brought us toys at Christmas, but I was careful not to say so. When I was ten, my father revealed this to me as a secret for adults because he assumed I already knew it, and he took me to the stores on Christmas Eve to select toys for my brothers and sisters. The same thing had happened with the mystery of childbirth even before I witnessed Matilde Armenta: I choked with laughter when people said that a stork brought babies from Paris. But I should confess that neither then nor now have I succeeded in connecting childbirth with sex. In any case, I think my intimacy with the maids could be the origin of a thread of secret communication that I believe I have with women and that throughout my life has allowed me to feel more comfortable and sure with them than with men. It may also be the source of my conviction that they are the ones who maintain the world while we men throw it into disarray with our historic brutality”
Excerpted from “Living to Tell the Tale”, author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Publisher: Vintage International, Vintage Books. A Division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Islander.