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

blockade was closed around her their only communication was by letters sent through ingenious channels. When she was not permitted to attend parties where he might be a guest, they saw each otherat a distance. Then the repression became so severe that no one dared defy the wrath of Tranquilina Iguarán, and the lovers disappeared from public view. When not even a crack was left open for furtive letters, they invented the stratagems of the shipwrecked. She managed to hide a greeting card in a cake that someone had ordered for Gabriel Eligio’s birthday, and he lost no opportunity to sendher false and innocuous telegrams with the real message in code or written in invisible ink. Aunt Francisca’s complicity then became so evident, despite her categorical denials, that for the first time her authority in the house was affected, and she was allowed to accompany her niece only when she was sewing in the shade of the almond trees. Then Gabriel Eligio sent messages of love from the windowof Dr. Alfredo Barboza, whose house was across the street, using the manual telegraphy of deaf-mutes. She learned it so well that when her aunt’s attention wandered she held intimate conversations with her sweetheart. It was only one of the countless tricks devised by Adriana Berdugo, a
comadre
of Luisa Santiaga’s and her most inventive and daring accomplice.
    These consoling devices would havebeen enough for them to survive over a slow fire, until Gabriel Eligio received an alarming letter from Luisa Santiaga that obliged him to think in a decisive way. She had written in haste, on toilet paper, giving him the bad news that her parents had resolved to take her to Barrancas, stopping in each town along the way, as a brutal cure for her lovesickness. It would not be the ordinary journeyof one bad night aboard the schooner to Riohacha, but the barbarous route along the spurs of the Sierra Nevada, on mules and in carts, across the vast province of Padilla.
    “I would rather have died,” my mother told me on the day we went to sell the house. And she had in fact tried to die, barring her bedroom door and eating nothing but bread and water for three days, until she was overcome bythe reverential terror she felt for her father. Gabriel Eligio realized that the tension had reached its limits, and he made a decision that was also extreme, but manageable. He strode across the street from Dr. Barboza’s house to the shade of the almond trees and stopped in front of the two women who waited for him in terror, their work in their laps.
    “Please leave me alone for a moment withthe señorita,” he said to Aunt Francisca. “I have something important to say that only she can hear.”
    “What insolence!” her aunt replied. “There’s nothing that has to do with her that I can’t hear.”
    “Then I won’t say it,” he said, “but I warn you that you will be responsible for whatever happens.”
    Luisa Santiaga begged her aunt to leave them alone and took responsibility. Then Gabriel Eligioexpressed his view that she should take the trip with her parents, in the manner they chose and for the time it might take, but only on the condition that she give her promise as a solemn oath that she would marry him. She was happy to do so and added on her own account that only death could prevent their marriage.
    They both had almost a year to demonstrate the seriousness of their promises,but neither one imagined how much it would cost them. The first part of the journey in a caravan of mule drivers, riding on muleback along the precipices of the Sierra Nevada, took two weeks. They were accompanied by Wenefrida’s maid Chon—an affectionate diminutive of Encarnación—who joined the family after they left Barrancas. The colonel knew that steep, rocky route all too well, for he had lefta trail of children there on the dissipated nights of his wars, but his wife had chosen it without knowing that, because she had bad memories of the schooner. For my mother,