Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine)

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The first Sunday I saw him he looked to me like a bullring nag, his velvet backstitched suspenders ornamented with golden thread, rings of precious stones on every finger and a braid of bells around his neck. He was standing on a table in the port of Santa María del Darién among bottles and vials of tonics and medicinal herbs which he himself prepared and peddled in the towns along the Caribbean. Only, this time, he was not trying to sell any of that worthless Indian brew, but rather he was asking that someone bring him a real, live poisonous snake so that he could put his own antidote to the test – the only guaranteed cure, ladies and gentlemen, for snake bites, tarantula and centipede bites and those of all kinds of poisonous animals. Someone who seemed especially impressed with his pitch managed to get hold of one of the worst snakes, the type whose poison first attacks the respiratory system. The vendor let it out of his basket with such relish that we all thought he was going to eat it, but, not satisfied with being free, the animal leapt out of the container and gave him a clip in the neck – right then and there he was left without wind for further oratory – that he scarcely had time to take the antidote and his two bit clinic overturned in the crowd. He remained there, writhing on the ground, his enormous body distorted as if it lacked solid form, and with his gold teeth on display, he went on laughing. What confusion there was! The American warship which had been docked there for twenty years on a goodwill mission declared a quarantine to keep the snake’s venom from coming on board, and the people who were observing Palm Sunday came running out of mass with their holy palms. No one wanted to miss the spectacle of the poisoned miracle vendor who was already beginning to swell with the air of death and was twice as fat as he had been before, frothing bile at the mouth, sweating profusely, but still laughing so vigorously that the bells jangled all over his body. The swelling burst the laces along the sides of his leggings and the seams of his clothing, his fingers were crippled by the pressure of the rings, his body flushed the colour of pickled venison and a pestilent stench erupted from his behind. In short, all who had seen the effects of snake bites knew he was rotting to death and that he was going to end up so decomposed that they would have to shovel him into a sack, and they also thought that until he reached the final stage of disintegration he would go on laughing. The whole thing was incredible. The marines climbed up to the bridges of the ship in order to take colour pictures with telescopic lenses but the women who had come out of mass thwarted their plans by covering up the dying man with a blanket and placing the palms on top, some because they didn’t like the marines to profane the body with their diabolic machines, others because they were afraid to keep looking at that heathen who had the nerve to die laughing. Everyone had given him up for dead when he suddenly threw off the blanket and, still half dazed and weakened by the ordeal, righted the table by himself, climbed back up crablike, and continued his harangue, exclaiming that the potion was simply God’s hand in a little flask, just as we had all seen with our own eyes although it only cost two cents since he wasn’t there to make money but to help humanity, and one at a time, ladies and gentlemen, please don’t crowd around, there’s enough for all.

He was capable of charming an astronomer into thinking that the month of February was no more than a herd of elephants.

Of course they crowded around, and with reason, because as it turns out there wasn’t enough for all. Even the admiral of the warship took along a bottle – convinced that it was also good for wounds inflicted by anarchists – and the crew, not content with having the colour pictures of Blacamán standing on the table that they couldn’t take of him dead, had him signing autographs until he got cramps in his arm. It was almost night time and only those of us who were most bewildered remained hanging around the port when he looked us over, searching for some fool who would help him put away the flasks – and of course he picked me. It was as if fate had sought out not only me but him and even though it’s been more than a century both of us still remember it as clearly as if it had been last Sunday. The fact is, we were putting his quack drugstore into that trunk wrapped in purple cloth which looked more like a dignitary’s coffin than anything else when he must have seen me in a different light than when he first set eyes upon me because he asked brusquely who are you and I answered that I was the only orphan in the world whose father had not died and he burst out laughing even more vociferously than during his demonstration and then he asked what do you do and I replied that I simply kept alive since nothing else is worth the trouble and still laughing himself to tears he asked me what did I most desire to know in the world. And that was the only time I answered him seriously, saying that I wanted to be able to practice the art of fortune-telling, and at that he didn’t laugh but said to me as if thinking aloud that I had practically achieved my goal since the most difficult part came natural to me, the look of a fool. That same night he spoke with my father, and for one real and two cents and a pack of gypsy cards for predicting adultery he bought me forever.

Such was Blacamán the Bad because I am Blacamán the Good. He was capable of charming an astronomer into thinking that the month of February was no more than a herd of elephants, but when luck turned against him he became an insufferable tyrant. In his days of glory he had been the embalmer of viceroys, and they say he would set their faces in a life-like mask of such authority that for many years they would continue governing better than when they had been alive and no one dared bury them until he gave them back their deadmen’s countenances. But he lost his reputation with the invention of an unending chess game which drove a priest crazy and caused the suicides of two illustrious men, and from then on he went downhill from dream interpreter to age guesser, from tooth extractor by suggestion to charlatan, so that by the time we met people already considered him a freebooter.

We wandered along with our second-hand store of smuggled goods, and life was an eternal headache trying to sell escape tablets for making smugglers invisible, secret drops that catholic wives put in the soup to inspire their protestant husbands with the fear of God, and all that you want to buy, on your own account of course, ladies and gentleman, because this is not an order but only advice, and in the end, happiness, just like everything else, can’t be forced upon you. Nevertheless for all our good laughs over his witticisms, the truth is we scarcely made enough for us to get by and his last hope was founded in my fortune-telling career. I shut myself up in that coffin-like trunk disguised as an oriental and wrapped up in big starboard chains. I would try to guess what I could while he exercised his oratory looking for the best way to convince people of my new talents, and here you have, ladies and gentlemen, this creature dazzled by the fireflies of Ezekiel, and you who are fixed to the spot with that perplexed stare, let’s see if you have the courage to ask him when you are going to die – but I never even managed to guess the day’s date, so he dismissed me as a fortune-teller saying my sluggish digestion upset my soothsaying gland, resolved to return me to my father and get his money back. However those times he discovered how to obtain electricity from a person’s suffering, and he made a sewing machine which functioned by a connection with suction cups to any part of the body which was in pain.
Since I was always in pain from the beatings he gave me for bringing bad luck he stayed with me because I served as guinea pig for his new invention, and so we kept putting off the return and his mood improved until the machine functioned so well that not only did it sew better than a beginner but besides it embroidered birds and flowers according to the position and intensity of the pain. We were busy with that, convinced that once again we had gotten the best of adversity when the news arrived that the commander of the warship had wanted to repeat the antidote demonstration in Philadelphia and in so doing turned into admiral marmalade in the presence of his staff.

He sank into a delirium about a woman so lovely that she could pass through walls with a sigh.

Blacamán didn’t laugh for a long time. We fled, travelling on Indian paths, but we could not outrun the rapidly spreading news that the marines had invaded the country with the pretext of conquering yellow fever and were decapitating all pedlars in its way, either by ambush or by chance encounter, and not only all native pedlars as a precaution, but the chinese pedlars for distraction, the negroes out of habit and the hindus for being snake charmers. They destroyed the flora and fauna and what they could of the mineral kingdom because their specialists in our affairs had taught them that the people of the Caribbean had the gift of transforming themselves by means of these natural substances to confuse the gringos. I couldn’t fathom the reason for all that anger nor why we were so afraid until we found ourselves, without mishap, in the windy deserts of the Guajira. Only there did he have the courage to confess to me that his potion was no other than rhubarb with turpentine, and that he had paid a hireling two cents to bring him that dangerous snake without venom. We settled in the ruins of a colonial mission, deceiving ourselves with the hope that the smugglers would come by – trustworthy men, and the only ones capable of adventuring into the hot sun of those saltpetre wastes. In the beginning we ate salamanders with raisinflowers. We still had the strength left to laugh when we tried to cook and eat his leggings, but in the end we even ate the cobwebs in the wells, and only then did we realise how much we missed the world. In those days I had no powers against death, so I simply lay down in the least painful position to await it, while he sank into a delirium about a woman so lovely that she could pass through walls with a sigh – but that fictional memory was just another artifice of his genius to mock death with amorous laments. However by the time we should have already been dead he approached me, more lively than ever, and spent the whole night watching me in my agony, thinking so intensely that I still can’t figure out if it was the wind or his thoughts that whistled through the ruins. Before daybreak he said to me with the voice and forcefulness of better days that now he knew the truth, and that it was I who had brought him bad luck – you had better hold onto your pants because just as you twisted my fate, you’re going to straighten it out.

This is where I lost the last bit of affection I felt for him. He stripped me of my rags, wrapped me in barbed wire, rubbed saltpetre stones on my sores, soaked me in my own urine and then hung me by the ankles to wither in the sun, and still shouted that the treatment wasn’t enough to pacify his pursuers. Lastly, he left me to rot in my own miseries within the dungeon which the colonial missionaries had used to reform heretics, and with the treacherous ventriloquist’s talent he still possessed he imitated the voices of carnivorous animals, the murmur of oars sliding through the water in October and the noise of the waterfalls to torture me with the illusion that I was wasting away in paradise. When at last the smugglers brought him supplies, he lowered himself into the dungeon to give me some tidbits to eat – just enough to keep alive – but then made me pay for this generosity by tearing out my nails with pliers and filing my teeth with grinding-stones, and my only consolation was the wish that life would give me time and opportunity to take revenge for such baseness with an even more terrible punishment. I myself was surprised to see how much I could endure the stink of my own putrefaction, and still he threw me the leftovers of his meals and killed desert animals to put them in the corners so that the air in the dungeon would eventually be unbreathable. I have no idea how much time had passed when one day he brought me the carcass of a rabbit to show me that he preferred to let it rot instead of giving it to me to eat. There my patience ended and all that remained was animosity, which I vented by grabbing the rabbit by its ears and flinging it against the wall with the illusion that it was Blacamán and not the animal who was being smashed – and that was when it happened, as in a dream, that the rabbit not only came alive with a cry of fear, but came flying back to my arms.

Thus began my famous career. Since then I wander from one place to another curing malarials of their fever for two pesos, giving sight to the blind for four-fifty, draining victims of dropsy for eighteen, putting the maimed back together again for twenty pesos if they were born deformed, for twenty-two if it happened by accident or in a fight, for twenty-five if it was caused by war, earthquakes, marine attacks or any other kind of public calamity, treating groups of sick people wholesale, madmen according to their particular obsession, children for half price, fools for nothing, so let’s see who dares say I am not a philanthrope, and right now, commander sir of the Twentieth Fleet, order your boys to take down the barricades to let suffering humanity pass through, the lepers on the left, the epileptics on the right, the paralytics where they won’t disturb anyone and behind them the less urgent cases, so please, no more, I won’t answer for those who were in the wrong group and are now cured of something they never had, and let loose the music until the brass melts, the rockets till the angels burn, and the aguardiente till the spirits drown, and come one and all homely maids and tightrope dancers, butchers and photographers, and all this at my expense, ladies and gentlemen, since here marks the end of the infamous Blacamáns and the beginning of heydey for all. That way I put them to sleep with politicians’ prattle, just in case my judgement fails and some end up sicker than they were before. The only thing I don’t do any more is revive the dead, because the minute they open their eyes they angrily attack the disturber of their sleep, and in the end those who don’t kill themselves die anyway of disappointment. At the beginning a committee of wisemen followed me around to investigate the legitimacy of my work, and when they were convinced they warned me that I would go to hell and recommended a life of penitence if I wished to become a saint, but I answered them without disrespect that it was precisely in purgatory I had begun. The truth of the matter is I am not going to gain anything by becoming a saint after I die. I am an artist, and all that I want is to live and continue travelling around with this sixteen-cylinder jalopy, which I bought from the American consul, with a chauffeur from Trinidad who was a baritone in the pirate opera house in New Orleans, with my pure silk shirts, my oriental lotions, my topaz teeth, my little round hat and my boots of two colours, sleeping without an alarm clock, dancing with beauty queens and charming them with my extensive rhetoric and without anxiety because, if perhaps some Ash Wednesday my faculties wither, I can keep living this good life getting by with my look of a fool and I earn more then enough with the infinite chain of stands I own, now that the same tourists who persecuted us for what had happened to the admiral crowd around to buy the portraits with my signature, the almanacs with my love poems, the medallions with my profile, pieces of my clothing for souvenirs and all that without having to pose a day and night like the grand marble equestrian statues of our forefathers, with swallows shitting all over them.

What a pity that Blacamán the Bad is unable to repeat this story so that you could see for yourself that it is true. The last time I or anybody else saw him in this world he had lost the last vestiges of his former splendour. His spirits were low and his body decrepit from the rigours of the desert, but he still had a good pair of bells left to make a reappearance in the port of Santa Maria del Darién with his everlasting coffin-like trunk, only this time he wasn’t trying to sell any potions but begging, his voice cracked with emotion, that the marines shoot him down in public to demonstrate in real life the resuscitory faculties of this supernatural creature, ladies and gentlemen, and although you have good reason not to believe me after having endured so long my tricks, I swear to you on my mother’s bones that today’s demonstration is no deception but only the humble truth, and if there is left any doubt in your minds, notice that I am not laughing now as before but stifling my tears. To make it convincing, he opened his shirt – his eyes drowned in tears – and pounded himself upon the chest to show where he was most vulnerable. However the marines didn’t dare fire for fear that the Sunday crowds would think they had lost their dignity. Someone who had perhaps not forgotten the blacamanisms of the old days managed to get hold of and bring in a can of some verbascum roots that were ordinarily used to catch corvinas by bringing them to the surface of the Caribbean, and Blacamán opened the container with such relish that they all thought for sure he was going to eat them, and in fact he did, ladies and gentlemen, and please don’t cry or pray for me, this death is only a visit. This time he was so straightforward that without any operatic throat rattles he simply climbed crab-like down from the table, accommodated himself on the ground, and from there he looked up at me as if I were his mother until he exhaled his final sigh, hugging himself, still holding in his manly tears, his body twisted by the tetanus of eternity. That was the only time, of course, when my technique failed. I put him into that coffin-sized trunk, ordered a funeral mass which cost me fifty doubloons instead of the usual four because the officiator was dressed in gold and besides three archbishops attended the ceremony, had them build a mausoleum fit for an emperor on a hill exposed to the most pleasant sea breezes with a chapel exclusively for him and an iron tombstone inscribed in large gothic letters with HERE LIES BLACAMÁN THE DEAD, WRONGLY CALLED THE BAD, he who mocked the marines and was a victim of science. And after doing sufficient homage to his virtues, I began to take revenge for his cruel acts, and revived him inside the iron-sealed sepulchre. There I left him writhing in horror. That was long before Santa Maria del Darién was destroyed by a tempest, but the mausoleum remains intact on the hill in the shade of dragons who go up there to sleep in the Atlantic breezes and each time I go by I bring him a whole carload of roses and my heart aches for his virtues. But afterwards I put my ear to the tombstone to hear him crying amidst the ruins of the dilapidated trunk, and if by chance he has died again I bring him back to life since the cleverness of the punishment is that he stays alive in the tomb as long as I live, which is to say, forever.

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Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Notable works include One Hundred Years of Solitude and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

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