I was the most destitute of the brotherhood, and often I took refuge in the Cafe Roma to write until dawn in an isolated corner, for my two jobs together had the paradoxical virtue of being important and ill-paid. Dawn found me there, reading without mercy, and when hunger pursued me I would have thick hot chocolate and a sandwich of good Spanish ham, and stroll with the first light of dawn beneath the flowering matarraton trees on the Paseo Bolivar. During the first weeks I wrote until very late in the newsroom, and slept a few hours in the empty offices or on the rolls of newsprint, but in time I found myself obliged to look for a less original place.
The solution, like so many others in the future, was given to me by the good-natured cabdrivers along the Paseo Bolivar: a transient hotel a block from the cathedral, where you could sleep alone or with a companion for a peso and a half. The building was very old but well maintained, at the expense of the solemn little whores who plundered the Paseo Bolivar after six in the evening, lying in wait for loves gone astray. The concierge was named Lacides. He had a crossed glass eye, and he stammered because of shyness, and I still remember him with an immense gratitude that began the first night I went there. He tossed the peso and fifty centavos into the drawer behind the counter, already filled with the loose, wrinkled bills of early evening, and he gave me the key to room number six.
I had never been in so peaceful a place. The most I heard were muffled steps, an incomprehensible murmur, and every once in a while the anguished creak of rusted springs. But not a whisper, not a sigh: nothing. The only difficulty was the ovenlike heat because the window was sealed shut with wooden crosspieces. Still, on the first night I read William Irish very well, almost until dawn.
It had been the mansion of former shipowners, with columns overlaid in alabaster and gaudy friezes around an interior courtyard covered by pagan stained glass that radiated the splendor of a greenhouse. The city's notary offices were on the ground floor. On each of the three stories of the original house there were six large marble chambers, converted into cardboard cubicles--just like mine--where the nightwalkers of the area reaped their harvest. That joyful bawdy house once had the name Hotel New York, and Alfonso Fuenmayor later called it the Skyscraper, in memory of the suicides who in those years were throwing themselves off the top of the Empire State Building.
In any case, the axis of our lives was the Libreria Mundo at twelve noon and at six in the evening, on the busiest block of Calle San Blas. German Vargas, an intimate friend of the owner, Don Jorge Rondon, was the one who convinced him to open the store that soon became the meeting place for young journalists, writers, and politicians. Rondon lacked business experience, but he soon learned, and with an enthusiasm and a generosity that soon turned him into an unforgettable Maecenas. German, Alvaro, and Alfonso were his advisors in ordering books, above all the new books from Buenos Aires, where publishers had begun the translation, printing, and mass distribution of new literature from all over the world following the Second World War. Thanks to them we could read in a timely way books that otherwise would not have come to the city. The publishers themselves encouraged their patrons and made it possible for Barranquilla to again become the center of reading it had been years earlier, until Don Ramon's historic bookstore ceased to exist.
It was not too long after my arrival when I joined the brotherhood that waited for the traveling salesmen from the Argentine publishers as if they were envoys from heaven. Thanks to them we were early admirers of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Felisberto Hernandez, and the English and North American novelists who were well translated by Victoria Ocampo's crew. Arturo Barea's The Making of a Rebel--was the first hopeful message from a remote Spain silenced by two wars. One of those travelers, the punctual Guillermo Davalos, had the good habit of sharing our nocturnal binges and giving us as presents the samples of his new books after he had finished his business in the city.
The group, who lived far from the center of the city, did not go to the Cafe Roma at night unless they had concrete reasons to do so. For me, on the other hand, it was the house I did not have. In the morning I worked in the peaceful editorial offices of El Heraldo, had lunch how, when, and where I could, but almost always as the guest of somebody in the group of good friends and interested politicians. In the afternoon I wrote "La Jirafa," my daily commentary, and any other occasional text. At twelve noon and six in the evening I was the most punctual at the Libreria Mundo. The aperitif at lunch, which the group drank for years at the Cafe Colombia, later moved to the Cafe Japy, across the street, because it was the busiest and most spirited one on Calle San Blas. We used it to see visitors, as an office and place of business, to conduct interviews, and as an easy place for all of us to meet.
Don Ramon's table at the Japy had inviolable laws imposed by custom. He was the first to arrive because of his schedule of teaching until four in the afternoon. No more than six of us fit at the table. We had chosen our places in relation to his, and it was considered bad taste to squeeze in other chairs where they did not fit. Because of the duration and quality of their friendship, from the first day German sat on his right. He took care of Don Ramon's material affairs. He resolved them even if he was not asked to, because the scholar had an innate vocation for not understanding practical life. In those days, the principal concern was the sale of his books to the departmental library and wrapping up other matters before he traveled to Barcelona. More than a secretary, German seemed like a good son.
Don Ramon's relations with Alfonso, on the other hand, were based on more difficult literary and political problems. As for Alvaro, it always seemed to me that he was inhibited when he found Don Ramon alone at the table and needed the presence of others to begin navigating. The only human being who had an absolute right to a place at the table was Jose Felix. At night, Don Ramon did not go to the Japy but to the nearby Cafe Roma, with his friends the Spanish exiles.
I was the last to join his table, and from the first day I sat, with no right of my own to it, in Alvaro Cepeda's chair while he was in New York. Don Ramon received me like one more disciple because he had read my stories in El Espectador. But I never would have imagined that I would become close enough to him to ask to borrow money for my trip to Aracataca with my mother. A short while later, in an inconceivable coincidence, we had our first and only conversation in private when I went to the Japy before the others in order to pay him, without witnesses, the six pesos he had lent me.
"Cheers, Genius," he greeted me as usual. But something in my face alarmed him: "Are you sick?"
"I don't believe so, Senor," I said with some uneasiness. "Why?"
"You look all in," he said, "but don't pay attention to me; these days we're all fotuts del cul."
He put the six pesos into his wallet with a reluctant gesture, as if the money were ill-gotten gains.
"I accept this," he explained, blushing, "as a memento of a very poor young man who was capable of paying a debt without being asked."
I did not know what to say, submerged in silence like a leaden well that I endured in the chatter of the room. I never dreamed how fortunate that meeting was. I had the impression that when the group talked, each one brought his grain of sand to the disorder, and the virtues and defects of each person were confused with those of the others, but it never occurred to me that I could talk alone about art and glory with a man who had lived for years in an encyclopedia. Often, late at night, when I was reading in the solitude of my room, I imagined exciting conversations I would have liked to have with him about my literary doubts, but they melted away without a trace in the light of the sun. My shyness grew even worse when Alfonso erupted with one of his extraordinary ideas, or German condemned one of the maestro's hurried opinions, or Alvaro shouted out a project that drove us out of our minds.
To my good fortune, that day in the Japy it was Don Ramon who took the initiative and asked me how my reading was going. At the time I had read everything I could find by the Lost Generation, in Spanish, with special attention to Fa
ulkner, whom I probed into with the bloodthirsty stealth of a straight razor because of my strange fear that in the long run he might be nothing more than an astute rhetorician. After saying this I was shaken by the apprehension that it would seem a provocation, and I tried to soften it, but Don Ramon did not give me time.
"Don't worry, Gabito," he answered in an impassive way. "If Faulkner were in Barranquilla he would be at this table."
On the other hand, he found it noteworthy that Ramon Gomez de la Serna interested me so much that I quoted him in "La Jirafa" together with others who were indisputable novelists. I explained that I did not do it because of his novels, since except for The Chalet of the Roses, which I had liked very much, what interested me about him were the audacity of his mind and his verbal talents, but only as a kind of rhythmic gymnastics for learning to write. In that sense, I do not recall a more intelligent genre than his famous greguerias, his vivid metaphoric images in prose. Don Ramon interrupted me with his mordant smile:
"The danger for you is that without realizing it you can also learn to write badly."
However, before changing the subject he admitted that in the midst of his phosphorescent disorder, Gomez de la Serna was a good poet. His replies were like that, immediate and learned, and I was so blinded by fear that someone would interrupt this unique occasion that my nerves almost did not allow me to assimilate them. But he knew how to manage the situation. His usual waiter brought him his eleven-thirty Coca-Cola, and he seemed to be unaware of it yet sipped at it through a paper straw without interrupting his explanations. Most of the patrons greeted him in a loud voice from the door: "How are you, Don Ramon?" And he would respond, not looking at them, with a wave of his artist's hand.
As he spoke, Don Ramon directed furtive glances at the leather briefcase I clutched at with both hands as I listened to him. When he finished drinking the first Coca-Cola, he twisted the straw as if it were a screwdriver and ordered the second. I asked for mine knowing very well that at this table each man paid his own bill. At last he asked about the mysterious briefcase to which I clung as if it were a life raft.
I told him the truth: it was the rough draft of the first chapter of the novel I had begun when I returned from Cataca with my mother. With an audacity I would never be capable of again at any crossroads in life or death, I placed the open briefcase on the table in front of him as an innocent inducement. He stared at me with his clear eyes of a dangerous blue and asked with some astonishment:
"May I?"
It was typed with countless corrections, on strips of newsprint folded like the bellows of an accordion. Without haste he put on his reading glasses, unfolded the strips of paper with professional skill, and arranged them on the table. He read without a variation in expression, without his skin changing color, without an alteration in his breathing, his cockatoo's tuft of hair unmoved by the rhythm of his thoughts. When he finished two complete strips he refolded them in silence, with medieval art, and closed the briefcase. Then he put his glasses in their case and placed it in his breast pocket.
"It is evident that the material is still raw, which is logical," he said with great simplicity. "But it's going well."
He made some marginal comments on my handling of time, which was my life-or-death problem and without a doubt the most difficult, and he added:
"You must be aware that the drama has already occurred and the characters are there only to evoke it, and so you have to contend with two different times."
After a series of precise technical comments that I could not appreciate because of my inexperience, he advised me not to call the city in the novel Barranquilla, as I had done in the rough draft, because it was a name so restricted by reality that it would leave the reader with very little room for dreaming. And he concluded in his mocking tone:
"Or play the innocent and wait for it to drop from heaven. After all, the Athens of Sophocles was never the same as the city of Antigone."
But what I followed to the letter forever after was the sentence with which he said goodbye to me that afternoon:
"I thank you for your courtesy, and I'm going to reciprocate with a piece of advice: never show anybody the rough draft of anything you're writing."
It was my only conversation alone with him, but it was worth all of them, because he left for Barcelona on April 15, 1950, as had been anticipated for more than a year, rarefied in his black woolen suit and magistrate's hat. It was like seeing off a schoolboy. At the age of sixty-eight he was in good health and his lucidity was intact, but those of us who accompanied him to the airport said goodbye as if he were someone returning to his native land to attend his own funeral.
Only on the following day, when we came to our table in the Japy, did we realize the void left by his chair, which no one would occupy until we agreed it should be German. We needed a few days to become accustomed to the new rhythm of our daily conversation, until the first letter from Don Ramon arrived, which was like hearing his voice written in a meticulous hand in purple ink. In this way a frequent and intense correspondence with all of us was initiated through German, in which he recounted very little of his life and a great deal about a Spain that he would continue to consider an enemy country as long as Franco lived and maintained Spanish dominion over Cataluna.
The idea for the weekly was Alfonso Fuenmayor's and had originated long before this time, but I have the impression it was hastened along by the departure of the Catalan scholar. When we were at the Cafe Roma three nights later, Alfonso informed us that he had everything ready for the launch. It would be a weekly twenty-page journalistic and literary tabloid whose name--Cronica--would not say much to anyone. To us it seemed insane that after four years of not acquiring funds from places that had more than enough money, Alfonso Fuenmayor had obtained backing from artisans, automobile mechanics, retired magistrates, and even complicit tavern owners who agreed to pay for their advertisements with rum. But there were reasons to think it would be well received in a city that, in the midst of its industrial drive and civic conceits, kept alive its devotion to its poets.
Other than ourselves there would be few regular contributors. The only professional with extensive experience was Carlos Osio Noguera--El Vate Osio, or Osio the Bard--a poet and journalist with a very personal amiability and an enormous body, who was a government functionary and a censor at El Nacional, where he had worked with Alvaro Cepeda and German Vargas. Another would be Roberto (Bob) Prieto, a strange, erudite member of the upper class who could think in English or French as well as he did in Spanish, and play various works by the great masters from memory on the piano. The least comprehensible person on the list thought up by Alfonso Fuenmayor was Julio Mario Santodomingo. He imposed him without reservation because of Santodomingo's intention to be a different kind of man, but what few of us understood was why he would appear on the list for the editorial board when he seemed destined to be a Latin Rockefeller, intelligent, educated, cordial, but condemned without appeal to the fog of power. Very few knew, as we four promoters of the magazine did, that the secret dream of his twenty-five years was to be a writer.
The publisher, by his own right, would be Alfonso. German Vargas would be more than anything else the great reporter with whom I hoped to share the position, not when I had time--we never had it--but when I achieved my dream of learning how to do it. Alvaro Cepeda would send contributions in his free time at Columbia University, in New York. At the end of the line, no one was freer and more eager than I to be named managing editor of an independent and uncertain weekly, and I was.
Alfonso had reserves in his files going back many years, and a good deal of advance work from the last six months, including editorial commentaries, literary materials, masterful articles, and promises of commercial advertising from his wealthy friends. The managing editor, with no fixed schedule and a salary better than that of any journalist in my category, but dependent on future earnings, was also prepared to put out a magazine that would be worthwhile and on time. At last, on Sa
turday of the following week, when I walked into our cubicle at El Heraldo at five in the afternoon, Alfonso Fuenmayor did not even look up to finish his editorial.
"Look over all your stuff, Maestro," he said. "Cronica's coming out next week."
I was not frightened because I had already heard the same statement twice before. But it happened on the third try. The biggest journalistic event of the week--by overwhelming odds--had been the arrival of the Brazilian soccer player Heleno de Freitas to play for Deportivo Junior, yet we would not cover it in competition with the specialized press but treat it as major news of cultural and social interest. Cronica would not allow itself to be pigeonholed by those kinds of distinctions, least of all when dealing with something as popular as soccer. The decision was unanimous and the work efficient.
We had prepared so much material in advance that the only last-minute item was the article about Heleno, written by German Vargas, a master of the genre and a soccer fanatic. The first issue was right on time and appeared on the newsstands on Saturday, April 29, 1950, the day of St. Catherine of Siena, the writer of blue letters on the most beautiful square in the world. Cronica was printed with a last-minute slogan of mine under the name: "Su mejor weekend," "Your Best Weekend." We knew we were defying the indigestible purism that prevailed in the Colombian press during those years, but what we wanted to say with the slogan had no equivalent with the same nuances in Spanish. The cover was an ink drawing of Heleno de Freitas by Alfonso Melo, the only portrait artist among our three draftsmen.