Living to Tell the Tale Read Free Page B

Then she continued her contemplation of each place along the way, and I knew what she thought of them by the changes in her silence. We passed the red-lightdistrict on the other side of the railroad tracks, with its little painted houses and rusty roofs and old parrots from Paramaribo that sat on rings hanging from the eaves and called out to clients in Portuguese. We passed the watering site for the locomotives, with its immense iron dome where migratory birds and lost seagulls took shelter to sleep. We rode around the edge of the city without enteringit, but we saw the wide, desolate streets and the former splendor of one-story houses with floor-to-ceiling windows, where endless exercises on the piano began at dawn. Without warning, my mother pointed her finger.
    “Look,” she said. “That’s where the world ended.”
    I followed the direction of her index finger and saw the station: a building of peeling wood, sloping tin roofs, and running balconies,and in front of it an arid little square that could not hold more than two hundred people. It was there, my mother told me that day, where in 1928 the army had killed an undetermined number of banana workers. I knew the event as if I had lived it, having heard it recounted and repeated a thousand times by my grandfather from the time I had a memory: the soldier reading the decree by whichthe striking laborers were declared a gang of lawbreakers; the three thousand men, women, and children motionless under the savage sun after the officer gave them five minutes to evacuate the square; the order to fire, the clattering machine guns spitting in white-hot bursts,the crowd trapped by panic as it was cut down, little by little, by the methodical, insatiable scissors of the shrapnel.
    The train would arrive at Ciénaga at nine in the morning, pick up passengers from the launches and those who had come down from the sierra, and continue into the interior of the banana region a quarter of an hour later. My mother and I reached the station after eight, but the train had been delayed. Still, we were the only passengers. She realized this as soon as she entered the empty car, andshe exclaimed with festive humor:
    “What luxury! The whole train just for us!”
    I have always thought it was a false gaiety to hide her disillusionment, for the ravages of time were plain to see in the condition of the cars. They were old second-class cars, but instead of cane seats or glass windowpanes that could be raised or lowered, they had wooden benches polished by the warm, unadorned bottomsof the poor. Compared to what it had been before, not only that car but the entire train was a ghost of itself. The train had once had three classes. Third class, where the poorest people rode, consisted of the same boxcars made of planks used to transport bananas or cattle going to slaughter, modified for passengers with long benches of raw wood. Second class had cane seats and bronze trim.First class, for government officials and executives of the banana company, had carpets in the corridor and upholstered seats, covered in red velvet, that could change position. When the head of the company took a trip, or his family, or his distinguished guests, a luxury car was coupled to the end of the train, with tinted glass in the windows and gilded cornices and an outdoor terrace with littletables for drinking tea on the journey. I never met a single mortal who had seen the inside of this unimaginable coach. My grandfather had twice been mayor and had a frivolous idea of money, but he traveled in second class only if he was with a female relative. And when asked why he traveled in third class, he would answer: “Because there’s no fourth.” However, at one time the most memorable aspectof the train had been its punctuality. Clocks in the towns were set by its whistle.
    That day, for one reason or another, it left an hour and a half late. When it began to move, very slow and with a mournful creaking, my mother crossed