Those who knew me when I was four say that I was pale and introverted, and spoke only to recount absurdities, but for the most part my stories were simple episodes from daily life that I made more attractive with fantastic details so that the adults would notice me. My best sources of inspiration were the conversations older people had in my presence because they thought I did not understand them, or the ones in intentional code in order to prevent my understanding them. Just the opposite was true: I soaked them up like a sponge, pulled them apart, rearranged them to make their origins disappear, and when I told them to the same people who had told the stories earlier, they were bewildered by the coincidence between what I said and what they were thinking.
At times I did not know what to do with my thoughts and I tried to hide them with rapid blinking. This happened so often that some rationalist in the family decided I should be seen by an eye doctor, who attributed my blinking to a problem with my tonsils and prescribed a syrup of iodized radish that worked very well to assuage the adults. For her part, my grandmother came to the providential conclusion that her grandson was a fortune-teller. This turned her into my favorite victim until the day she suffered a dizzy spell because I really did dream that a live bird had come out of my grandfather's mouth. The fear that she would die because of me was the first moderating element in my precocious lack of restraint. Now I believe these were not a child's mean tricks, as one might think, but a budding narrator's rudimentary techniques to make reality more entertaining and comprehensible.
My first passage into real life was the discovery of soccer in the middle of the street or in some nearby gardens. My teacher was Luis Carmelo Correa, who was born with a natural instinct for sports and an inborn talent for mathematics. I was five months older, but he made fun of me because he was growing taller and faster than me. We began to play with balls made of cloth and I managed to become a good goalie, but when we moved on to a regulation ball I was hit in the stomach by a kick of his so powerful that my vanity could go no further. On the occasions we have met as adults, I have confirmed with great joy that we continue to treat each other as we did when we were boys. But my most striking memory from that time was the swift passage of the superintendent of the banana company in a luxurious open car, beside a woman with long golden hair that blew in the wind, and a German shepherd sitting like a king in the seat of honor. They were instantaneous apparitions from a remote, unimaginable world forbidden to us mortals.
I began to assist at Mass without too much belief but with a rigor that perhaps was interpreted as an essential ingredient of faith. It must have been on account of those virtues that I was taken at the age of six to Father Angarita to be initiated into the mysteries of First Communion. It changed my life. They began to treat me like an adult, and the principal sacristan taught me how to assist at Mass. My only problem was that I could not understand at what moment I was supposed to ring the bell, and I would ring it when it occurred to me as the result of inspiration pure and simple. The third time I did this the priest turned around and told me in a severe way not to ring it again. The best part of the service was when the other altar boy, the sacristan, and I were left alone to straighten up the sacristy and would eat the leftover Hosts with a glass of wine.
On the eve of my First Communion the priest heard my confession with no preambles, sitting like a real pope on the thronelike chair while I kneeled in front of him on a plush cushion. My awareness of good and evil was rather simple, but the priest assisted me with a dictionary of sins so that I could say which ones I had committed and which ones I had not. I believe I responded well until he asked me if I had done impure things with animals. I had the confused notion that some men committed some sin with she-donkeys that I had never understood, but not until that night did I learn that it was also possible with hens. And so my first step for my First Communion was another great stride forward in the loss of my innocence, and I did not find any reason to continue as an altar boy.
My test by fire was when my parents moved to Cataca with Luis Enrique and Aida, my brother and other sister. Margot, who barely remembered Papa, was terrified of him. I was too, but with me he always was more wary. Only once did he take off his belt to whip me, and I stood firm, bit my lips, and looked him in the eye, prepared to endure anything in order not to cry. He lowered his arm and began to put his belt back on while he mumbled reproaches for what I had done. In our long conversations as adults, he confessed that it hurt him a great deal to hit us, but perhaps he did it because of his terror that we would turn out to be crooks. In his good moments he was amusing. He loved to tell jokes at the table, and some were very good, but he repeated them so often that one day Luis Enrique stood up and said:
"Let me know when all of you finish laughing."
The historic whipping, however, took place on the night Luis Enrique did not show up at my parents' house or my grandparents' house, and they looked for him all over town until they found him at the movies. Celso Daza, who sold cold drinks, had served him one made of sapodilla fruit at eight o'clock, and Luis Enrique had disappeared without paying and with the glass. The woman who prepared fried food sold him an empanada and saw him a short while later talking to the doorman at the movie, who let him in without paying because he had said his papa was waiting for him inside. The picture was Dracula, with Carlos Villarias and Lupita Tovar, directed by George Melford. For years Luis Enrique would tell me about his terror at the moment the lights went on in the theater as Count Dracula was about to sink his vampire's fangs into the neck of the beautiful girl. He was in the most remote seat he could find in the balcony, and from there he saw Papa and our grandfather searching row by row in the orchestra seats, along with the owner of the theater and two police officers. They were about to give up when Papalelo caught sight of him in the last row of the top balcony and pointed with his walking stick:
"There he is!"
Papa pulled him out by the hair, and the beating he gave him in the house became a legendary punishment in the history of the family. My terror and my admiration for my brother's act of independence remained forever vivid in my memory. But he seemed to survive everything and become more and more heroic. Yet today I am intrigued that his rebelliousness was not expressed during those rare times when Papa was not in the house.
I took refuge more than ever in the shadow of my grandfather. We were always together, in the mornings in his workshop or his finance administrator's office, where he assigned me a happy task: to draw the brands of the cows that were going to be slaughtered, and I did this with so much seriousness that he gave me his place at the desk. When it was time for lunch, with all the guests, we always sat at the head of the table, he with his large aluminum pitcher of ice water and I with a silver spoon that I used for everything. People were surprised to see that if I wanted a piece of ice, I would put my hand into the pitcher to pick it out, and a skim of grease was left on the water. My grandfather defended me: "He has every right."
At eleven we went to meet the train, for his son Juan de Dios, who still lived in Santa Marta, sent him a letter every day with the conductor, who would charge five centavos. For another five centavos my grandfather sent an answer on the return train. In the afternoon, as the sun was going down, he led me by the hand to tend to his personal errands. We went to the barber shop--the longest quarter of an hour in my childhood; to see the fireworks on patriotic holidays--which terrified me; to Holy Week processions--with a dead Christ who I had always thought was flesh and blood. I wore a Scotch plaid cap, just like one my grandfather had, which Mina had bought for me so I would look more like him. She was so successful that Uncle Quinte viewed us as a single person with two different ages.
At any hour of the day my grandfather would take me shopping at the banana company's succulent commissary. There I discovered red snapper, and placed my hand on ice for the first time and was shaken to discover that it was cold. I was happy eating whatever I wanted, but his chess games with the Belgian and his political conversa
tions bored me. Now I realize, however, that on those long excursions we would see two different worlds. My grandfather saw his on his horizon, and I saw mine at eye level. He greeted his friends on their balconies, and I longed for the peddler's toys displayed on the sidewalks.
In the early evening we would linger in the universal din of Las Cuatro Esquinas, he conversing with Don Antonio Daconte, who received him standing in the doorway of his colorful establishment, and I marveling at the latest from all over the world. I was driven wild by carnival magicians who pulled rabbits out of hats, fire-eaters, ventriloquists who made animals talk, accordion players who shouted out songs about the things happening in the Province. Today I realize that one of them, very old and with a white beard, may have been the legendary Francisco el Hombre.
Each time he thought the film appropriate, Don Antonio Daconte would invite us to the early show at the Olympia, to the consternation of my grandmother, who considered it debauchery unsuitable for an innocent grandson. But Papalelo persisted, and the next day he would have me recount the film at the table, correcting my oversights and errors and helping me to reconstruct the difficult episodes. These were early indications of dramatic art that no doubt were of benefit to me, above all when I began to draw comic strips before I learned to write. At first I was praised for my childish achievements, but I liked the easy applause of the adults so much that they began to avoid me when they heard me coming. Later the same thing happened with the songs I was obliged to sing at weddings and birthday parties.
Before we went to sleep we spent a long while in the studio of the Belgian, the terrifying old man who appeared in Aracataca after the First World War, and I do not doubt he was Belgian because of the recollection I have of his bewildering accent and his sailor's nostalgic memories. The other living creature in his house was a Great Dane, who was deaf and a pederast and named for a president of the United States: Woodrow Wilson. I met the Belgian when I was four years old and my grandfather would go to play silent, interminable games of chess with him. Beginning on the first night, I was astounded that there was nothing in the house whose use I could determine. For he was an artist of everything that survived in the disorder of his own works: pastel seascapes, photographs of children on birthdays and First Communions, copies of Asian jewels, figures made of cow horn, furniture of disparate periods and styles, one piece stacked on the other.
I was struck by his skin, which adhered to his bones and was the same sunny yellow color as his hair, and the lock of hair that fell over his face and got in the way when he spoke. He smoked an old sea wolf's pipe that he lit only for chess, and my grandfather said it was a trick to distract his opponent. He had a bulging glass eye that seemed more interested in his interlocutor than the healthy eye. He was crippled from the waist down, hunched forward and twisted to his left, but he navigated like a fish among the reefs of his workshops, hanging from rather than leaning on his wooden crutches. I never heard him speak about his voyages, which were, it seemed, numerous and intrepid. The only passion he was known to have outside his house was for the movies, and on weekends he never missed a film no matter what kind it was.
I never liked him, least of all during the chess games when it took him hours to move a single piece while I was collapsing with exhaustion. One night he looked so helpless that I was assaulted by the premonition that he would die very soon, and I felt sorry for him. But over time he began to think so much about his moves that I ended up wishing with all my heart that he would die.
During this time my grandfather hung in the dining room the picture of the Liberator Simon Bolivar at his funeral. It was difficult for me to understand why he did not have the corpse's shroud I had seen at wakes, but lay stretched out on a desk wearing the uniform of his days of glory. My grandfather cleared up my doubts with a categorical statement:
"He was different."
Then, in a tremulous voice that did not seem to be his, he read me a long poem that hung next to the picture, of which I remembered only and forever the final verses: "Thou, Santa Marta, wert charitable, and in thy lap thou gavest him that piece of the ocean's strand to die." From then on, and for many years afterward, I had the idea that Bolivar had been found dead on the beach. It was my grandfather who taught me and asked me never to forget that he was the greatest man ever born in the history of the world. Confused by the discrepancy between his statement and another that my grandmother had made to me with equal emphasis, I asked my grandfather if Bolivar was greater than Jesus Christ. He replied, shaking his head without his earlier conviction:
"One thing has nothing to do with the other."
I know now that it had been my grandmother who insisted that her husband take me with him on his twilight excursions, for she was certain they were pretexts for visiting his real or hypothetical lovers. It is probable that at times I served as his alibi, but the truth is that he never took me anywhere that was not on the anticipated itinerary. I have a clear image, however, of a night when I was holding somebody's hand and happened to pass a strange house and saw my grandfather sitting like the lord and master in the living room. I never could understand why I was shaken by the intuition that I should not tell this to anyone. Until the sun rose today.
It was also my grandfather who gave me my first contact with the written word when I was five, and he took me one afternoon to see the animals in a circus passing through Cataca, under a tent as large as a church. The one that attracted my attention was a battered, desolate ruminant with the expression of a frightening mother.
"It's a camel," my grandfather told me.
Someone standing nearby interrupted:
"Excuse me, Colonel, but it's a dromedary."
I can imagine now how my grandfather must have felt when someone corrected him in the presence of his grandson. Without even thinking about it, he went him one better with a worthy question:
"What's the difference?"
"I don't know," the other man said, "but this is a dromedary."
My grandfather was not an educated man and did not pretend to be one, for he had dropped out of the public school in Riohacha to go and shoot a gun in one of the countless civil wars along the Caribbean. He never studied again, but all his life he was conscious of the gaps, and he had an avid desire for immediate knowledge that more than compensated for his deficiencies. That afternoon he returned dejected to his office and consulted the dictionary with childish attention. Then he and I learned for the rest of our lives the difference between a dromedary and a camel. In the end he placed the glorious tome in my lap and said:
"This book not only knows everything, but it's also the only one that's never wrong."
It was a huge illustrated book, on its spine a colossal Atlas holding the vault of the universe on his shoulders. I did not know how to read or write, but I could imagine how correct the colonel was if the book had almost two thousand large, crowded pages with beautiful drawings. In church I had been surprised by the size of the missal, but the dictionary was thicker. It was like looking out at the entire world for the first time.
"How many words does it have?" I asked.
"All of them," said my grandfather.
The truth is that I did not need the written word at this time because I expressed everything that made an impression on me in drawings. At the age of four I had drawn a magician who cut off his wife's head and put it back on again, just as Richardine had done in his act at the Olympia. The graphic sequence began with the decapitation by handsaw, continued with the triumphant display of the bleeding head, and ended with the wife, her head restored, thanking the audience for its applause. Comic strips had already been invented but I only saw them later in the color supplement to the Sunday papers. Then I began to invent graphic stories without dialogue. But when my grandfather gave me the dictionary, it roused so much curiosity in me about words that I read it as if it were a novel, in alphabetical order, with little understanding. That was my first contact with what would be the fundamental book in my destiny as
a writer.
When children are told the first story that in reality appeals to them, it is very difficult to get them to listen to another. I believe this is not true for children who are storytellers, and it was not true for me. I wanted more. The voracity with which I listened to stories always left me hoping for a better one the next day, above all those that had to do with the mysteries of sacred history.
Everything that happened to me in the street had an enormous resonance in the house. The women in the kitchen would tell the stories to the strangers arriving on the train, who in turn brought other stories to be told, and all of it was incorporated into the torrent of oral tradition. Some events were first learned through the accordion players who sang about them at fairs, and travelers would retell them and enhance them. But the most striking story of my childhood occurred very early one Sunday, on our way to Mass, in an ill-advised sentence spoken by my grandmother:
"Poor Nicolasito is going to miss Pentecost Mass."
I was happy, because Sunday Mass was too long for a boy my age, and the sermons of Father Angarita, whom I loved so much as a child, seemed soporific. But it was a vain illusion, for my grandfather almost dragged me to the Belgian's studio, in the green velveteen suit I had been dressed in for Mass and that was too tight for me in the crotch. The police officers recognized my grandfather from a distance and opened the door for him with the ritual formula:
"Go in, Colonel."
Only then did I learn that the Belgian had inhaled a solution of gold cyanide--which he shared with his dog--after seeing All Quiet on the Western Front, the picture by Lewis Milestone based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Popular intuition, which always finds the truth even when it seems impossible, understood and proclaimed that the Belgian had not been able to endure the shock of seeing himself crushed with his decimated patrol in a morass of mud in Normandy.