Living to Tell the Tale

  He did not even think that, for he, too, was not capable of accepting an idea without first having reduced it to its proper size. Still, I knew him well enough to realize that perhaps my emotion regarding the trip had not moved him as much as I had hoped, but it had no doubt intrigued him. That was true: beginning the next day he began to ask me all sorts of casual but very lucid questions about how the writing was going, and a simple facial expression of his was enough to make me think that something ought to be corrected.

  While we were talking I had gathered my papers together in order to clear the desk, since that morning Alfonso had to write the first editorial for Cronica. But he had news that cheered my day: the first issue, expected for the following week, was being postponed a fifth time because of inadequate supplies of paper. With luck, Alfonso said, we would have the first issue in three weeks.

  I thought this providential delay would be enough time for me to complete the beginning of the book, for I was still too green to realize that novels do not begin the way you want them to, but the way they want to. In fact, six months later, when I believed I was working on the final version, I had to do a complete rewrite of the first ten pages so that the reader would believe them, and today they still do not seem valid to me. The delay must have been a relief for Alfonso as well, because instead of complaining about it he took off his jacket and sat down at the desk to continue correcting the recent edition of the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Language, which we had received during this time. It had been his favorite pastime since he happened to come across an error in an English dictionary and had sent the documented correction to the publishers in London, perhaps with no other gratification than including one of our jokes in his letter: "At last England owes us, the Colombians, a favor." The publishers responded with a very cordial letter in which they recognized their mistake and asked him to continue collaborating with them. He did, for several years, and he not only found more slips in the same dictionary but in others as well, in various languages. When that relationship ended, he had already contracted the solitary vice of correcting dictionaries in Spanish, English, or French, and if someone was late, or he had to wait for a bus or stand in any of the other lines that fill our lives, he passed the time in the millimetric task of hunting down errors in the thickets of languages.

  By twelve o'clock the heat was unbearable. The smoke from our cigarettes had clouded the small amount of light that came in through the two windows, but neither of us took the trouble to ventilate the office, perhaps because of the secondary addiction to smoking the same smoke over again until you died. With the heat it was different. I have the inherent good fortune of being able to ignore it until it is ninety degrees in the shade. Alfonso, on the other hand, without interrupting his work, was taking off his clothing piece by piece as the heat began to press in on him: tie, shirt, undershirt. With the added advantage that his clothing remained dry while he was drowning in perspiration, and he could put it on again when the sun went down, as unwrinkled and fresh as it had been at breakfast. This must have been the secret that allowed him to always appear anywhere with his linen white, his ties knotted, and his coarse Indian hair divided in the center of his skull by a mathematical line. That is how he looked at one o'clock, when he walked out of the bathroom as if he had just awakened from a restorative sleep. When he walked past me he asked:

  "Shall we have lunch?"

  "Not hungry, Maestro," I said.

  In the code of the tribe it was a direct reply: if I said yes it was because I was in dire straits, perhaps after two days of bread and water, and in that case I would go with him without further commentary, and it was clear that he would arrange to pay for me. My answer--"not hungry"--could mean anything, but it was my way of telling him that lunch was not a problem. We agreed to see each other in the evening, as always, at the Libreria Mundo.

  A short while after midday a young man came in who looked like a movie star. He was very blond, his skin was tanned, his eyes were a mysterious blue, and he had the warm voice of a harmonium. As we spoke about the magazine that would soon appear, he drew the outline of a fighting bull on the cover of the desk in six masterful lines and signed it with a message for Fuenmayor. Then he tossed the pencil onto the table and took his leave with a slam of the door. I was so absorbed in my writing that I did not even look at the name on the drawing. I wrote for the rest of the day without eating or drinking, and when the afternoon light faded I had to grope my way out with the first sketches of my new novel, happy in the certainty that I at last had found a path different from what I had been writing without hope for more than a year.

  I did not learn until that night that the afternoon visitor was the painter Alejandro Obregon, who had just returned from another of his many trips to Europe. He was not only one of the great painters in Colombia but one of the men most loved by his friends, and he had come home early to participate in the launching of Cronica. I found him with his intimates in a nameless tavern on La Luz, a lane in the middle of Barrio Abajo, which Alfonso Fuenmayor had baptized with the title of a recent book by Graham Greene: El tercer hombre--The Third Man. Alejandro's returns were always historic, and the one that night culminated with the performance of a trained cricket that obeyed its owner's orders as if it were human. It would stand on two legs, extend its wings, sing with rhythmic whistles, and recognize applause with theatrical bows. Finally, when its trainer was intoxicated by a salvo of applause, Obregon picked up the cricket by its wings, held it with his fingertips, and to the astonishment of everyone put it in his mouth and chewed the live insect with sensual delight. It was not easy to make amends to the inconsolable trainer with all kinds of flattery and gifts. Later I learned it was not the first cricket that Obregon had eaten alive at a public performance, and it would not be the last.

  Never did I feel, as I did in those days, so much a part of that city and the half-dozen friends who were beginning to be known as the Barranquilla Group in the journalistic and intellectual circles of the country. They were young writers and artists who exercised a certain leadership in the cultural life of the city, guided by the Catalan master Don Ramon Vinyes, a legendary dramatist and bookseller who had been consecrated in the Espasa Encyclopedia since 1924.

  I had met them in September of the previous year when I came from Cartagena--where I lived then--on the urgent recommendation of Clemente Manuel Zabala, the editor-in-chief of El Universal, the paper where I had written my first editorials. We spent one night talking about everything and established so enthusiastic and constant a communication, exchanging books and literary jokes, that I ended up working with them. Three of the original group were distinguished by their independence and the strength of their vocations: German Vargas, Alfonso Fuenmayor, and Alvaro Cepeda Samudio. We had so many things in common that vindictive people would say we all had the same father, but we were marked and disliked in certain quarters because of our independence, our irresistible vocations, a creative determination that elbowed its way forward, and a timidity that each one resolved in his own way, not always with good fortune.

  Alfonso Fuenmayor was an excellent writer and journalist of twenty-eight who for a long time had written a topical column in El Heraldo--"Wind of the Day"--using the Shakespearian pseudonym Puck. The more familiar we became with his informality and sense of humor, the less we understood how he had read so many books in four languages on every imaginable topic. His last indispensable experience, when he was almost fifty years old, was an enormous and battered automobile that he would drive at great risk to everyone at twenty kilometers an hour. Cabdrivers, his great friends and most perceptive readers, recognized him from a distance and moved away to clear the street for him.

  German Vargas Cantillo was a columnist for the evening paper El Nacional, and a knowledgeable and biting literary critic whose prose was so amiable he could convince the reader that things had happened only because he recounted them. He was one of the best commentators on radio and no doubt the best educated in t
hose times that were so good for new professions, and an inimitable example of the natural reporter I would have liked to be. He was blond and big-boned, with eyes of a dangerous blue; it was never possible to understand when he had the time to be up-to-date on everything worth reading. He did not back down for an instant from his early obsession with discovering literary values hidden in remote corners of the forgotten Province and bringing them to light. It was lucky he never learned to drive in that brotherhood of the distracted, for we were afraid he would not resist the temptation to read while he was at the wheel.

  Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, on the other hand, was more than anything a dazzling driver--of automobiles as well as letters, a wonderful storyteller when he felt like sitting down to write them, a masterful film critic, and no doubt the best educated among them, and an instigator of reckless polemics. He looked like a Gypsy from the Cienaga Grande, with tanned skin, a beautiful head of tousled black curls, and a madman's eyes that did not hide his tender heart. His favorite footwear was the cheapest cloth sandals, and between his teeth he clenched an enormous cigar that was almost always unlit. He had written his first pieces as a journalist, and published his first stories, in El Nacional. That year he was in New York finishing a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University.

  An itinerant member of the group, and the most distinguished, along with Don Ramon, was Jose Felix Fuenmayor, Alfonso's father. A historic journalist and one of the great narrators, he had published a book of poems, Tropical Muses, in 1910, and two novels: Cosme, in 1927, and A Sad Adventure of Fourteen Wise Men, in 1928. None of them was a commercial success, but specialized critics always considered Jose Felix one of the best storytellers, one who had been smothered by the Province's foliage.

  I had not heard of him when I met him, one midday when we happened to be the only people in the Cafe Japy, and I was dazzled on the spot by the learning and simplicity of his conversation. He was a veteran and a survivor of a sordid prison in the War of a Thousand Days. He did not have the education of Vinyes, but he was closer to me because of his nature and his Caribbean culture. But what I liked best about him was his strange ability to convey his learning as if it were child's play. He was an invincible conversationalist and a teacher of life, and his mode of thinking was different from everything I had known until then. Alvaro Cepeda and I spent hours listening to him, above all because of his basic tenet that the essential differences between life and literature were simple errors of form. Later, I don't remember where, Alvaro wrote in an accurate flash of intuition: "We all come from Jose Felix."

  The group had formed in a spontaneous fashion, almost through the power of gravity, by virtue of an affinity that was indestructible but difficult to understand at first glance. We were often asked why we always agreed when we were so different, and we had to improvise some kind of answer in order not to tell the truth: we did not always agree, but we understood the reasons. We were conscious of the fact that outside our circle we had an image as arrogant, narcissistic, and anarchic. Above all because of our political positions. Alfonso was viewed as an orthodox liberal, German as a reluctant freethinker, Alvaro as an arbitrary anarchist, and I as an unbelieving Communist and potential suicide. But I believe without any doubt at all that our greatest good fortune was that even in the most extreme difficulties we might lose our patience but never our sense of humor.

  We discussed our few serious disagreements only among ourselves, and at times they reached dangerous temperatures, but even so they were forgotten as soon as we got up from the table or a friend not in the group came over. I learned the least forgettable lesson, forever, in the Los Almendros bar, one night soon after I had arrived, when Alvaro and I became embroiled in a discussion of Faulkner. The only witnesses at the table were German and Alfonso, and they kept to the sidelines, maintaining a stony silence that reached unbearable extremes. I do not remember at what moment, full of rage and a raw aguardiente, I challenged Alvaro to settle the argument with our fists. We both were ready to get up from the table and go out into the middle of the street, when the impassive voice of German Vargas stopped us short with an eternal lesson:

  "Whoever stands up first has lost."

  None of us had turned thirty at the time. At the age of twenty-three, I was the youngest of the group, and had been adopted by them after I came to stay in December. But at the table of Don Ramon Vinyes, the four of us behaved as the advocates and postulators of the faith, always together, talking about the same things, mocking everything, and so much in agreement about taking a contrary position that we came to be viewed as only one person.

  The only woman we considered part of the group was Meira Delmar, who had already been initiated into the poetic passion, but we conversed with her only on the few occasions when we went outside our sphere of disreputable behavior. Evenings at her house were memorable, with famous writers and artists who were passing through the city. Another friend with less time, whom we saw with less frequency, was the painter Cecilia Porras, who on occasion visited from Cartagena and accompanied us on our nocturnal rounds, because she did not care at all that women were looked at askance in drunkards' cafes and houses of ill repute.

  The group would meet twice a day in the Libreria Mundo, which became a literary meeting place. It was a peaceful still water in the midst of the din of Calle San Blas, the noisy and feverish commercial thoroughfare along which the center of the city emptied out at six in the afternoon. Alfonso and I, like diligent students, would write until early evening in our office next to the newsroom at El Heraldo, he composing his judicious editorials and I my untidy articles. Often we would exchange ideas from one typewriter to the other, lend each other adjectives, trade information back and forth, until it was difficult to know in some cases which paragraph belonged to whom.

  Our daily life was almost always predictable, except on Friday nights when we were at the mercy of inspiration and sometimes went on until breakfast on Monday. If interest waylaid us, the four of us would undertake a literary pilgrimage without restraint or moderation. It would begin at El Tercer Hombre with the artisans from the neighborhood and the mechanics from a car repair shop, in addition to dissolute public officials and others who were a little less so. The strangest one of all was a residential thief who arrived a little before midnight in the uniform of his trade: ballet tights, tennis shoes, a baseball cap, and a satchel of lightweight tools. Someone who caught him robbing his house managed to take his picture and published the photograph in the press in case anyone could identify him. The only thing he obtained were several letters from readers indignant at the dirty trick that had been played on poor sneak thieves.

  The thief had a strong literary vocation, he did not miss a word of our conversations about art and books, and we knew he was the shamefaced author of love poems that he declaimed for the other patrons when we were not there. After midnight he went out to rob in the wealthy neighborhoods, as if it were his job, and three or four hours later he would bring us a gift of some trinkets taken from his larger haul. "For your girls," he would say, not even asking if we had any. When a book caught his eye he would bring it to us as a gift, and if it was worthwhile we would donate it to the departmental library directed by Meira Delmar.

  Those itinerant pontifications had earned us a turbid reputation among the good comadres whom we would see as they left five o'clock Mass, and they would cross the street in order not to pass too close to those who were drunk at dawn. But the truth is there was no drunken carousing more honorable and fruitful. If anyone knew this right away I did, for I joined them in their shouting in the brothels about the work of John Dos Passos or the goals missed by the Deportivo Junior team. In fact, one of the charming hetaeras at El Gato Negro, fed up with an entire night of arguments at no charge, had yelled at us as we left:

  "If you guys fucked as much as you shouted, we girls would be bathed in gold!"

  We often went to see the new sun at a nameless brothel in the red-light district where Orlando Rivera (Fi
gurita) had lived for years while he painted a history-making mural. I do not remember anyone wilder, with his lunatic eyes, his goatee, and his orphan's kindness. In elementary school he had been bitten by the mad idea that he was Cuban and became more of a Cuban, and a better Cuban, than if he really had been one. He spoke, ate, painted, dressed, fell in love, danced, and lived his life as a Cuban, and he died a Cuban without ever visiting Cuba.

  He did not sleep. When we visited him at dawn he would jump down from the scaffolding, daubed with more paint than the mural, and blaspheming in the language of the Mambises* in a marijuana hangover. Alfonso and I would bring him articles and stories to illustrate, and we had to tell him about them because he did not have the patience to understand them when they were read. He did his drawings in an instant using the techniques of caricature, which were the only ones he believed in. He almost always liked them, though German Vargas would say in a good-humored way that they were much better when he didn't.

  This was how Barranquilla was, a city that resembled no other, above all from December to March, when the northern trade winds compensated for infernal days with nocturnal gales that whirled around the courtyards of houses and carried chickens through the air. Only the transient hotels and the sailors' taverns around the port remained alive. Some little nocturnal birds would wait whole nights for an always uncertain clientele from the riverboats. A brass band would play a languid waltz on the alameda but no one heard it because of the shouts of the drivers arguing about soccer among the taxis parked facing into the sidewalk along the Paseo Bolivar. The only possible place was the Cafe Roma, which was frequented by Spanish refugees and never closed for the simple reason that it had no doors. It also had no roof, in a city of sacramental rainstorms, but you never heard of anyone who stopped eating a potato omelet or closing a deal on account of the rain. It was a retreat from the weather, with little round tables painted white and iron chairs under the foliage of flowering acacias. At eleven, when the morning papers--El Heraldo and La Prensa--went to press, the night editors would meet there to eat. The Spanish refugees were there from seven on, after listening at home to the spoken newspaper of Professor Juan Jose Perez Domenech, who continued to report on the Spanish Civil War twelve years after it had been lost. One fateful night, the writer Eduardo Zalamea anchored there on his way back from La Guajira, and he shot himself in the chest with a revolver without serious consequences. The table became a historic relic that the waiters showed to tourists, who were not permitted to sit at it. Years later, Zalamea published the testimony of his adventure in Cuatro anos a bordo de mi mismo--Four Years Aboard Myself--a novel that opened unsuspected horizons for our generation.