Vicente’s Massacre
In 1928, The American Banana Company massacred three thousand striking workers in the Colombian village of Macondo and disappeared the bodies, leaving only one witness. When he described the massacre to his fellow villagers, they denied it and ignored him. More than half a century later in Mexico City, Vicente Jimenez Florenzo read about the tragedy in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude from his father’s collection. His father was a literature teacher at a high school in a working-class neighborhood and a member of a teacher’s union, so it wasn’t surprising that Vicente read a significant amount of socialist literature and later served in the Communist Party in Nicaragua before moving to Massachusetts to study a PhD in history at a small liberal arts college. He turned out to be a capable historian, publishing a paper in the Revista de Historia Economica about the exploitation of the working class in three Latin American countries.
But he rarely spoke about academics when describing his years in Massachusetts. Instead, he told stories of his love for a Haitian artist who now haunted his memory. After making love, they would play chess while drinking coffee. “I rarely beat her,” he would say to friends and colleagues. “She had a sharper mind than any of those Massholes.” She left one winter day, and he never told anyone why, perhaps because most believed he greatly exaggerated her in the first place.
Years later, Vicente Jimenez Florenzo took a post in the history department of a middling university in Barranquilla, Colombia, about a two-hour drive from Macondo. There he started a radio show and interviewed historians and local academics. One of his guests was an English professor, Tom, from the Midwest. He enjoyed Tom’s company because they spoke in English, which Vicente feared he would forget without regular practice, and Tom happened to be a
decent chess player. They played at a table outside the university cafeteria, sweating through their shirts in the unforgiving Caribbean humidity.
Vicente enjoyed a successful academic tenure at the university, but around Tom he was often melancholic and rarely talked of his scholarly endeavors. Instead, he preferred to speak about his love affairs with the women he met in the city. On weekends, he drove them to the beach in his silver Renault Clio. Sometimes he took them dancing at the old-fashioned club, La Cueva, where Gabriel Garcia Marquez drank with his writer friends decades earlier. There he liked to take them by the hand and lead them to a dark oak chest with a top glass pane inside of which sat a block of dry ice and announce proudly, “This is the ice that the merchant brings to Macando in the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
His romances burned hot but brief, ending as quickly as they began. One, a dancer, broke into his apartment twice, so he instructed the doorman never to let her in again. Another mocked his love of poetry. Later he started seeing the kind and good-humored Antonella, but a few short weeks later he informed Tom that he had broken things off. When Tom inquired the reason, Vicente said, “She hasn’t read a book in years.” He meant to say it matter-of-factly, but Tom heard the veiled sorrow in his voice.
One afternoon, Vicente drove Tom in the Clio past the Casa de Carnaval in the historic neighborhood, Barrio Abajo. The going was slow due to the traffic. Vicente’s eyes wandered to his right, lazily observing the faded and chipped paint on the concrete houses when he saw a young woman playing chess with a friend on the sidewalk. Her skin was a clear brown that gleaned in the Caribbean sun and her hair thick with tight curls. She wore a leotard with yellow and blue sequins, and at her feet leaning against her muscled legs was an enormous feathered headdress, the kind the best dancers wore in the parades during Carnaval.
Frantically, Vicente searched for parking, but not finding any, he decided to circle the block. In his mind’s eye, Vicente imagined himself approaching the woman, asking courteously for a game, and the conversation that would ensue over a rigorous battle. They would talk of
Colombian and Mexican literature, of poets and journalists, labor movements in Latin America, or perhaps the history of Cartagena and the slave uprising.
He cursed the car in front of him that was driving too slow and the cars parked within inches of one another along the sidewalk. Finally, he turned the corner back onto the street where he had seen her. The chessboard, table, chairs, and headdress had vanished, and so had the woman. Vicente let the car idle as he scanned the street forward and back. A car horn sounded impatiently behind him and he was forced to move on. He circled the block again.
“What are we doing?” Tom asked.
“Didn’t you see her?”
“See who?”
“The black dancer playing chess!” Vicente cried.
Vicente pointed to the sidewalk. Two elderly men drank light beer in the shade of an awning. A tired woman sold coconut treats from a basket resting atop her head. A parade of school children in their Catholic uniforms marched in uneven rows of two and three.
Tom shook his head. “Sounds like she was everything you ever wanted,” he smirked.
Vicente thought about his past lovers: some were beautiful, some well-read, a few were artists, one or two dancers, none were all things, save perhaps the Haitian in Massachusetts, whom he missed most, and the chess-playing dancer who would exist only as a ghost in his memory from now on.
“Macondo,” he sighed bitterly and drove off.
Trey C. Erwin is a lecturer of English as a second language at Southern Utah University. He has lived and worked in Colombia, Turkey, and the United States. Trey has published in Reflective Practice and TESOL Connections. He also enjoys writing stories about the people and places from his years abroad.