Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (13 page)
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Authors: Gabriel García Márquez
“Do me a favor and find me a piece of paper,” he said to the guard.
He probably thought the guard would go to the office to look for paper. But the guard’s orders were not to leave
me alone. Rather than go looking for it, he went to the corridor and called out: “Bring some writing paper on the double.”
A moment later, the paper arrived. More than five minutes had gone by and the doctor still hadn’t asked me a question. The examination didn’t begin until the paper arrived. He handed me the paper and asked me to draw a ship. I drew a ship. Then he asked me to sign the drawing, which I did. Next he asked me to draw a farmhouse. I drew a house as best I could, with a banana plant next to it. He asked me to sign the drawing. That was when I became convinced he was a reporter in disguise. But he insisted he was a doctor.
When I finished drawing he examined the papers, mumbled a few words, and began to ask questions about my adventure. But the guard intervened to remind him that that kind of question was not permitted. Then he examined my body, the way a doctor does. His hands were ice cold. If the guard had touched them, he would have thrown the man out of the room. But I said nothing, because his nervousness and the possibility that he might be a reporter aroused my sympathy. Before his fifteen minutes were up he hurried out, taking the drawings with him.
All hell broke loose the next day. The drawings appeared on the front page of
El Tiempo
, complete with captions and arrows. “This is where I went overboard,” read one caption, with an arrow pointing toward the ship’s bridge. Which was an error, because I had been on the stern, not on the bridge. But the drawings were mine.
I was told that I should ask for a correction. That I could demand one. But that seemed absurd. I felt great admiration for a reporter who would disguise himself as a doctor to gain entrance to a military hospital. If he had
found a way to let me know he was a reporter, I would have known how to get rid of the guard. Because, in fact, I had already been given permission that day to tell my story.
The adventure of the reporter in disguise gave me a very good idea of how much interest the newspapers had in the story of my ten days at sea. Everyone was interested. My own friends asked me to tell it many times. When I got to Bogotá, now almost fully recovered, I realized that my life had changed. I was greeted with great fanfare at the airport. I was decorated by the president of the country—he congratulated me on my heroic feat. From that day on, I knew I would remain in the Navy, but now with the rank of cadet.
In addition, there was something I hadn’t anticipated: offers from advertising and publicity agencies. I was very grateful for my watch, which had kept perfect time during my odyssey, but I didn’t think that would be of much interest to the watch manufacturer. Nonetheless, they gave me five hundred pesos and a new watch. For using a certain brand of chewing gum and saying so in an ad, I received a thousand pesos. I was lucky that the manufacturer of my shoes gave me two thousand pesos for endorsing them in an ad. For permitting my story to be told on radio I received five thousand. I never imagined that surviving ten days of hunger and thirst would turn out to be so profitable. But it is: up till now I have received almost ten thousand pesos. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t relive that adventure for a million.
My hero’s life is nothing extraordinary. I get up at ten o’clock in the morning. I go to a café to chat with my friends, or to one of the agencies working on ads about my adventure. I go to the movies almost every day. And I’m never alone. But I can’t reveal the name of my companion, for that belongs to the rest of my story.
Every day I receive letters from all over. Letters from people I don’t know. From Pereira, bearing the initials J.V.C., I received a long poem about rafts and sea gulls. Mary Address, who had a mass said for the repose of my soul when I was adrift in the Caribbean, writes to me frequently. She sent me an inscribed photograph, which newspaper readers have seen.
I have told my story on television and on a radio program. I’ve also told it to my friends. I told it to an elderly widow with a huge photograph album who invited me to her home. Some people tell me this story is a fantasy. And I ask them: If it is, then what did I do during my ten days at sea?
James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann,
E.M. Forster, Isak Dinesen, Albert Camus, Günter Grass,
V.S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, Gabriel García Márquez,
Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Primo Levi, among many others:
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G
ABRIEL
G
ARCÍA
M
ÁRQUEZ
CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place twenty-seven years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society—not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.
Fiction/Literature
THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
General Simon Bolivar, “the Liberator” of five South American countries, takes a last melancholy journey down the Magdalena River, revisiting cities along its shores, and reliving the triumphs, passions, and betrayals of his life. Infinitely charming, prodigiously successful in love, war, and politics, he still dances with such enthusiasm and skill that his witnesses cannot believe he is ill. Aflame with memories of the power that he commanded and the dream of continental unity that eluded him, he is a moving exemplar of how much can be won—and lost—in a life.
Fiction/Literature
LIVING TO TELL THE TALE
No writer of his time exerted the magical appeal of Gabriel García Márquez. In this autobiography, the great Nobel laureate tells the story of his life, from his birth in 1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. The result is as spectacular as his finest fiction. Here is García Márquez’s shimmering evocation of his childhood home of Aracataca, the basis of the fictional Macondo. Here are the members of his ebulliently eccentric family. Here are the forces that turned him into a writer. Warm, revealing, abounding in images so vivid that we seem to be remembering them ourselves,
Living to Tell the Tale
is a work of enchantment.
Autobiography
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.
Fiction/Literature
MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES
On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit—he has purchased hundreds of women—he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic,
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
is an exquisite addition to the master’s work.
Fiction/Literature
NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING
In 1990, fearing extradition to the United States, Pablo Escobar—head of the Medellín drug cartel—kidnapped ten notable Colombians to use as bargaining chips. With the eye of a poet, García Márquez describes the survivors’ perilous ordeal and the bizarre drama of the negotiations for their release. With cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and journalistic rigor, García Márquez evokes the sickness that inflicts his beloved country and how it penetrates every strata of society, from the lowliest peasant to the President himself.
Nonfiction
OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria—the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport—is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love—and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible,
Of Love and Other Demons
is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.
Fiction/Literature
THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
In 1955, García Márquez was working for
El Espectador
, a newspaper in Bogotá, when in February of that year eight crew members of the
Caldas
, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is García Márquez’s account of that sailor’s ordeal.
Nonfiction
STRANGE PILGRIMS
In Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortune-telling position with a wealthy family. In Geneva, an ambulance driver and his wife take in the lonely, apparently dying ex-President of a Caribbean country, only to discover that his political ambition is very much intact. In these twelve masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience.
Short Stories/Literature
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