Living to Tell the Tale

  "There are scholarships," I said.

  "Lots," said Papa, "but for the rich."

  In part this was true, not because of favoritism but because the application procedures were difficult and the requirements not well publicized. As a result of centralism, everyone who aspired to a scholarship had to go to Bogota, a distance of a thousand kilometers in eight days of travel that cost almost as much as three months at a good boarding school. But even so it might be pointless. My mother became exasperated:

  "When you start scheming about money, you know where it begins but not where it ends."

  Besides, there were other obligations that had not yet been paid. Luis Enrique, a year younger than I, had matriculated in two local schools and had dropped out of both of them after a few months. Margarita and Aida were doing well at the nuns' primary school, but they had already begun thinking about a cheaper city nearby for their baccalaureates. Gustavo, Ligia, Rita, and Jaime were not yet a pressing concern, but they were growing at an alarming rate. They, as well as the three who were born after them, treated me like someone who always arrived only to leave again.

  It was my decisive year. The greatest attraction of each float were the girls chosen for their grace and beauty, and dressed like queens, who recited verses that alluded to the symbolic war between the two halves of the town. Still half an outsider, I enjoyed the privilege of being neutral, which is how I behaved. That year, however, I gave in to the pleas of the captains of Congoveo to write the verses for my sister Carmen Rosa, who would be the queen of a monumental float. I was delighted to oblige, but because of my ignorance of the rules of the game, I went too far in my attacks on the adversary. I had no other recourse but to rectify the transgression with two poems of peace: one of atonement for the beauty from Congoveo and another of reconciliation for the beauty from Zulia. The incident became public. The anonymous poet, almost unknown in town, was the hero of the day. The episode introduced me into society and earned me the friendship of both bands. From then on I did not have enough time to help at children's plays, charity bazaars, philanthropic fairs, and even the speech of a candidate for the municipal council.

  Luis Enrique, who was already showing signs of the inspired guitarist he would become, taught me to play the tiple, the treble guitar. With him and Filadelfo Velilla we became the kings of serenades, the first prize being that some of the serenaded girls dressed in a hurry, opened the house, woke the girls next door, and we continued the party until breakfast. That year the group was enhanced when it was joined by Jose Palencia, the grandson of a wealthy and generous landowner. Jose was a born musician capable of playing any instrument he came across. He looked like a movie star, was a stellar dancer, had a dazzling intelligence, and luck more envied than enviable in transient loves.

  I, on the other hand, did not know how to dance and could not learn even in the house of the Senoritas Loiseau, six sisters, invalids from birth, who nonetheless gave classes in fine dancing without getting up from their rocking chairs. My father, never insensitive to reputation, approached me with a new point of view. For the first time we spent long hours talking. We almost did not know each other. In reality, looking back on it, I did not live with my parents for a total of more than three years, adding up the time with them in Aracataca, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Since, and Sucre. It was a very agreeable experience that allowed me to know them better. My mother said to me: "How nice that you've become friends with your papa." Days later, while she was preparing coffee in the kitchen, she said even more:

  "Your papa is very proud of you."

  The next day she tiptoed in to wake me and breathed in my ear: "Your papa has a surprise for you." In fact, when he came down for breakfast, he himself gave me the news in the presence of everyone, and said with a solemn emphasis:

  "Get your stuff together, you're going to Bogota."

  The initial impact was one of great frustration, because what I would have wanted then was to remain submerged in perpetual carousing. But innocence prevailed. There was no problem about clothes for cold weather. My father had a black cheviot twill suit and another of corduroy, and he could not button either one at the waist. We went to Pedro Leon Rosales, called the tailor of miracles, and he altered them to fit me. My mother also bought me the camel's hair overcoat of a dead senator. When she was measuring it on me at home, my sister Ligia--who is a natural clairvoyant--warned me in secret that the ghost of the senator was wandering through his house at night wearing the overcoat. I paid no attention to her, but I should have, because when I put it on in Bogota, I saw the face of the dead senator in the mirror. I pawned it for ten pesos and never redeemed it.

  The domestic atmosphere had improved so much that I was on the verge of tears when we said our goodbyes, but the plan was followed in a precise way, without sentimentality. In the second week of January, in Magangue, I embarked on the David Arango, the flagship of the Colombian Shipping Company, after spending one night as a free man. My cabinmate was an angel who weighed two hundred twenty pounds and whose entire body was hairless. He had usurped the name Jack the Ripper, and he was the last survivor of a family of circus knife throwers from Asia Minor. At first glance he looked capable of strangling me in my sleep, but in the days that followed I realized he was only what he seemed: a giant baby with a heart too big for his body.

  There was an official party on the first night, with an orchestra and a gala supper, but I escaped to the deck, contemplated for the last time the lights of the world I was preparing to forget without sorrow, and cried my eyes out until dawn. Today I can dare to say that the only reason I would want to be a boy again is to enjoy that voyage once more. I had to take the trip back and forth several times during the four years of the baccalaureate and another two at the university, and each time I learned more about life than I did in school, and learned it better than I did in school. At the time of year when the water was high, it was a five-day trip from Barranquilla to Puerto Salgar, where you then had to travel by train to Bogota. In times of drought, when sailing was more amusing if you were not in a hurry, it could take up to three weeks.

  The ships had easy, basic names: Atlantico, Medellin, Capitan de Caro, David Arango. Their captains, like those of Conrad, were authoritarian, good-natured men who ate like savages and did not know how to sleep alone in their regal cabins. The voyages were slow and surprising. We passengers sat in the galleries all day in order to see the forgotten villages, the coffin-shaped caimans, their jaws open waiting for unwary butterflies, the flocks of herons that took flight, startled by the wake of the ship, the coveys of ducks from the interior swamps, the manatees that sang on the wide beaches as they suckled their babies. During the whole voyage you woke at dawn dazed by the clamoring of monkeys and cockatoos. Often, your siesta was interrupted by the nauseating stench of a drowned cow, motionless in the trickle of water, a solitary turkey buzzard perched on its belly.

  Now it is unusual to meet anyone on a plane. On the riverboats we students ended up seeming like one family, because every year we would arrange to make the trip at the same time. At times the ship would be stranded for up to fifteen days on a sandbar. No one cared, because the fiesta continued, and a letter from the captain sealed with his signet ring served as an excuse for arriving late at school.

  From the first day I was struck by the youngest member of a family group who played the bandoneon as if half asleep, strolling for days on end along the deck in first class. I could not endure my envy, because ever since I heard the first accordion players of Francisco el Hombre on the July 20 celebrations in Aracataca I had urged my grandfather to buy me an accordion, but my grandmother always blocked us with the usual absurdities about the accordion being a vulgar instrument for the lower classes. Some thirty years later in Paris I thought I recognized the elegant accordionist from the ship at an international conference of neurologists. Time had done its work: he had grown a bohemian beard and his clothes were larger by a couple of sizes, but the memory of his artistry was so vi
vid I could not be mistaken. His reaction, however, could not have been colder when I asked him without introducing myself:

  "How's the bandoneon?"

  He replied in surprise:

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  I felt the earth swallowing me, and I gave him my humble excuses for having confused him with a student who played the bandoneon on the David Arango early in January of 1944. Then he gleamed with the memory. He was the Colombian Salomon Hakim, one of the great neurologists in this world. The disappointment was that he had exchanged the bandoneon for medical engineering.

  Another passenger attracted my attention because of his distance. He was young, robust, with a ruddy complexion, glasses for nearsightedness, and a premature baldness that he carried off very well. He seemed the perfect image of the Cachaco tourist. From the first day he cornered the most comfortable armchair, placed several towers of new books on an end table, and read without blinking from the morning until he was distracted by the carousing at night. Every day he appeared in the dining room wearing a different flowered beach shirt, and he ate breakfast, lunch, and supper, and continued reading alone at the most isolated table. I do not believe he had exchanged a single greeting with anyone. In my mind I baptized him "the insatiable reader."

  I did not resist the temptation of sneaking a look at his books. Most were indigestible treatises on public law, which he read in the mornings, underlining and making notes in the margins. When the afternoons grew cool he read novels. Among them, one that astonished me: Dostoyevsky's The Double, which I had tried without success to steal from a bookstore in Barranquilla. I was mad to read it. In fact, I would have asked to borrow it but did not have the courage. One day he showed up with The Great Meaulnes, which I had not heard of but which very soon became one of my favorite masterpieces. On the other hand, I carried only unrepeatable books that I had already read: Jeromin, by Father Coloma, that I never finished reading; The Vortex, by Jose Eustasio Rivera; From the Apennines to the Andes, by Edmundo de Amicis, and my grandfather's dictionary, which I read for hours. The implacable reader, on the contrary, did not have enough time for all the books he had. What I mean to say and have not said is that I would have given anything to be him.

  The third traveler, of course, was Jack the Ripper, my roommate, who talked in his sleep in a barbaric tongue for hours on end. His speeches had a melodic quality that gave a new depth to my readings in the middle of the night. He told me he was not aware of it and did not know what language he could be dreaming in, because as a boy he could talk with the acrobats in his circus in six Asian dialects but had forgotten all of them when his mother died. All that was left was Polish, his original language, but we were able to establish that this was not what he was speaking in his sleep. I do not recall a creature more lovable as he oiled and tested the edges of his sinister knives on his rosy tongue.

  His only problem had been on the first day in the dining room, when he protested to the waiters that he could not survive the voyage if they did not serve him four portions. The bosun explained that it would be fine if he paid for them as a supplement with a special discount. He claimed that he had traveled the oceans of the world and on all of them they had recognized his human right not to die of hunger. The case went all the way to the captain, who decided in very Colombian fashion that he should be served two portions, and that the waiters could be distracted enough to let two more slip from their hands. He also helped himself by picking with his fork at the plates of his table companions and a few neighbors without appetite who took pleasure in his ideas. You had to be there to believe it.

  I did not know what to do with myself until La Gloria, where a group of students boarded and formed trios and quartets at night and sang beautiful serenades of romantic boleros. When I discovered that they had an extra tiple, I took it over and rehearsed with them in the afternoons, and we would sing until dawn. The tedium of my free time found a remedy in a solution that came from the heart: whoever does not sing cannot imagine the pleasure of singing.

  One night when there was a full moon we were awakened by a heartrending lament from the riverbank. The captain, Climaco Conde Abello, one of the greatest of them, gave an order to use searchlights to find the origin of the weeping: it was a manatee female who had become entangled in the branches of a fallen tree. Launches went into the water, and they moored her to a capstan and managed to free her. She was a fantastic, touching creature, half woman and half cow, almost four meters long. Her skin was livid and tender, and her large-breasted torso was that of a biblical matriarch. It was this same Captain Conde Abello whom I heard say, for the first time, that the world would come to an end if people kept killing the animals in the river, and he prohibited shooting from his boat.

  "Whoever wants to kill somebody can go kill him in his own house!" he shouted. "Not on my ship!"

  January 19, 1961, seventeen years later, I remember as a hateful day because a friend called me in Mexico to tell me that the steamship David Arango had caught fire and burned to ashes in the port of Magangue. I hung up with the terrible realization that my youth had ended that day, and the little still left to us of our river of nostalgic memories had gone to hell. Today the Magdalena River is dead, its waters polluted, its animals annihilated. The work of restoration talked about so much by successive governments that have done nothing would require the planting by experts of some sixty million trees on ninety percent of privately owned lands whose owners would have to give up, for sheer love of country, ninety percent of their current incomes.

  Each voyage taught great lessons about life that connected us in an ephemeral but unforgettable way to the life of the towns we passed through, and many of us became forever caught up in their destinies. A renowned medical student went to a wedding dance uninvited, danced without permission with the prettiest woman at the party, and was shot to death by her husband. Another, in an epic bout of drinking, married the first girl he liked in Puerto Berrio and is still happy with her and their nine children. Jose Palencia, our friend from Sucre, won a cow in a drummers' competition in Tenerife and sold it on the spot for fifty pesos: a fortune at the time. In the immense red-light district in Barrancabermeja, the oil capital, we were astounded to find Angel Casij Palencia, Jose's first cousin who had disappeared without a trace from Sucre the previous year, singing with the band in a brothel. The band took care of the bill for the dancing and carousing that lasted until dawn.

  My ugliest memory is of a gloomy tavern in Puerto Berrio, where the police drove four of us passengers out with clubs, not giving or listening to any explanations, and arrested us on the charge of having raped a female student. When we reached police headquarters they already had the real culprits--some local thugs who had nothing to do with our boat--behind bars, without a scratch.

  At the final port of call, Puerto Salgar, we had to disembark at five in the morning dressed for the high country. Men in black wool with vests and mushroom-shaped hats and topcoats over their arms had changed identities surrounded by the psaltery of the toads and the pestilential stink of the river overflowing with dead animals. When it was time to go ashore I had an unexpected surprise. An eleventh-hour friend had convinced my mother to make me a Corroncho, or coastal petate, with its narrow string hammock, wool blanket, and an emergency chamber pot, all of it wrapped in a mat made of esparto grass and tied into a cross with the cords of the hammock. My musical companions could not contain their laughter at seeing me with that kind of baggage in the cradle of civilization, and the most determined of them did what I would not have dared to do: he threw it into the water. My final vision of that unforgettable trip was the sight of the petate returning to its origins as it rolled in the current.

  During the first four hours the train from Puerto Salgar climbed the rock cornices as if it were crawling. On the steepest sections it would slide back in order to gather momentum and attempt the ascent again, breathing as hard as a dragon. At times it was necessary for the passengers to get out to l
ighten the load and climb to the next cornice on foot. The towns along the way were sad and ice-cold, and in the deserted stations all that waited for us were the women who were lifelong vendors and offered through the train windows fat yellow chickens cooked whole and some snowy potatoes that tasted like heaven. That was where I felt for the first time an unknown and invisible physical state: cold. It was fortunate that at dusk, the immense savannas, as green and beautiful as a sea in heaven, opened without warning toward the horizon. The world became tranquil and fast-moving. The atmosphere in the train changed.

  I had forgotten altogether about the insatiable reader when he appeared all of a sudden and sat across from me with a look of urgency. It was incredible. He had been impressed by a bolero that we sang at night on the ship, and he asked me to copy it down for him. Not only did I do that, but I taught him how to sing it. I was surprised by his good ear and the brilliance of his voice when he sang it alone the first time, without mistakes.

  "That woman's going to die when she hears it!" he exclaimed, radiant.

  Then I understood his urgency. When he heard us sing the bolero on the ship, he felt it would be a revelation for the sweetheart who had said goodbye to him three months earlier in Bogota and was waiting for him that afternoon in the station. He had heard it again two or three times, and was able to reconstruct it in bits and pieces, but when he saw me sitting alone on the train, he had resolved to ask the favor. Then I also felt bold enough to tell him, with some malice, though it had nothing to do with anything, how surprised I had been to see on his table a book that was so difficult to find. His surprise was authentic:

  "Which one?"

  "The Double."

  He laughed with satisfaction.

  "I haven't finished it yet," he said. "But it's one of the strangest things I've come across."

  He went no further. He thanked me in every way possible for the bolero and said goodbye with a firm handshake.

  It was beginning to grow dark when the train slowed, passed by a shed filled with rusted scrap iron, and anchored at a gloomy dock. I grasped my trunk by the handle and dragged it toward the street before the crowd could knock me down. I was almost there when someone shouted: