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

This impression was strengthened when Luisa Santiaga suffered a recurrence of the tertian fevers of her childhood, and her mother took her away to recuperate in the town of Manaure, an Edenicspot in the foothills of the sierra. Both always denied having any communication during those months, but this is not very credible, for when she returned, recovered from her ailments, both also seemed to have recovered from their misgivings. My father would say that he went to meet her at the station because he had read the telegram in which Mina announced their return, and when Luisa Santiagashook his hand in greeting, he felt something like a Masonic sign that he interpreted as a message of love. She always denied this with the same modesty and shyness she brought to her evocations of those years. But the truth is that from then on they were less reticent about being seen together. All she needed was the ending that Aunt Francisca provided the following week while they were sewingin the hallway of begonias:
    “Mina knows everything.”
    Luisa Santiaga always said it was her family’s opposition that made her leap across the dikes of the torrent she had kept hidden in her heart since the night she left her suitor standing in the middle of the dance floor. It was a bitter war. The colonel attempted to stay on the sidelines, but he could not elude the blame that Mina threw inhis face when she realized he was not as innocent as he appeared. It seemed clear to everyone that the intolerance was not his but hers, when in reality it was inscribed in the law of the tribe, for whom every suitor is an interloper. This atavistic prejudice, whose embers still smolder, has turned us into a vast community of unmarried women and men with their flies unzipped and numerous childrenborn out of wedlock.
    Friends were divided, for or against the lovers, according to age, and those who did not have a firm position had oneimposed by events. The young became their enthusiastic accomplices. His above all, for he relished his position as the sacrificial victim of social prejudices. The majority of adults, however, viewed Luisa Santiaga as the precious jewel of a rich and powerfulfamily whom a parvenu telegraph operator was courting not for love but self-interest. She herself, once obedient and submissive, confronted her opponents with the ferocity of a lioness that has just given birth. In the most corrosive of their many domestic disputes, Mina lost her temper and threatened her daughter with the bread knife. An impassive Luisa Santiaga stood her ground. When she becameaware of the criminal impetus of her wrath, Mina dropped the knife and screamed in horror: “Oh my God!” And placed her hand on the hot coals of the stove as a brutal penance.
    Among the powerful arguments against Gabriel Eligio was his status as the love child of an unmarried woman who had given birth to him at the tender age of fourteen after a casual misstep with a schoolteacher. She was calledArgemira García Paternina, a slender, free-spirited white girl who had another five sons and two daughters by three different fathers whom she never married or lived with under the same roof. She resided in the town of Sincé, where she had been born, and scratched out a living for her offspring with an independent and joyful spirit that we, her grandchildren, might well have wanted for a PalmSunday. Gabriel Eligio was a distinguished example of that ragged breed. Since the age of seventeen he’d had five virgin lovers, as he revealed to my mother in an act of penance on their wedding night aboard the hazardous Riohacha schooner as it was lashed by a squall. He confessed that with one of them, when he was eighteen and the telegraph operator in Achí, he’d had a son, Abelardo, who was almostthree. With another, when he was twenty and the telegraph operator in Ayapel, he had a daughter a few months old, whom he had never seen and whose name was Carmen Rosa. He had promised the baby’s mother that