Three of the most self-sacrificing instructors taught languages. The first was the English teacher, Mister Abella, a pure Caribbean with perfect Oxonian diction and a somewhat ecclesiastical fervor for Webster's Dictionary, which he would recite with his eyes closed. His successor was Hector Figueroa, a good young teacher with a feverish passion for the boleros that we would sing in harmony during recess. I did the best I could in the stupor of classes and on the final examination, but I believe my good grade was not because of Shakespeare so much as Leo Marini and Hugo Romani, the Argentine singers of boleros responsible for so many paradises and so many suicides of love. The fourth-year French teacher, Monsieur Antonio Yela Alban, found me intoxicated by detective novels. His classes bored me as much as all the rest, but his opportune references to street French helped me to not die of hunger in Paris ten years later.
The majority of the teachers had been trained at the Normal Superior under the direction of Dr. Jose Francisco Socarras, a psychiatrist from San Juan del Cesar bent on replacing the clerical pedagogy of a century of Conservative governments with a humanistic rationalism. Manuel Cuello del Rio was a radical Marxist who, perhaps for that reason, admired Lin Yutang and believed in apparitions of the dead. The library of Carlos Julio Calderon, presided over by his countryman Jose Eustasio Rivera, author of The Vortex, was divided into equal parts of Greek classics, Latin American members of Stone and Sky, and romantics from everywhere. Thanks to all of them, the few of us who were assiduous readers read St. John of the Cross or Jose Maria Vargas Vila, as well as the apostles of the proletarian revolution. Gonzalo Ocampo, the social sciences instructor, had a good political library in his room that circulated without malice in the classrooms of the older students, but I never understood why The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Friedrich Engels was studied in the arid afternoons of political economy and not in literature classes as the epic poem of a beautiful human adventure. During recreation periods Guillermo Lopez Guerra read Anti-Duhring, also by Engels, lent to him by Professor Gonzalo Ocampo. But when I asked him for it so I could discuss it with Lopez Guerra, Ocampo said he would not do me that bad turn with a great tome fundamental to the progress of humanity but so long and boring it might not pass into history. Perhaps this ideological swapping contributed to the liceo's bad reputation as a laboratory of political perversion. But I needed half a lifetime to realize it might have been more of a spontaneous experiment to frighten away the weak and immunize the strong against all kinds of dogmatisms.
My most direct relationship was always with Professor Carlos Julio Calderon, the teacher of Spanish in the lower grades, of world literature in the fourth year, Spanish literature in the fifth, and Colombian literature in the sixth. And of something odd in his formation, considering his tastes: accounting. He had been born in Neiva, the capital of the department of Huila, and he never tired of proclaiming his patriotic admiration for Jose Eustasio Rivera. He had been obliged to interrupt his studies of medicine and surgery, and he remembered this as the frustration of his life, but his passion for arts and letters was irresistible. He was the first teacher to demolish my rough drafts with pertinent observations.
In any case, relations between students and teachers were exceptional for their naturalness, not only in classes but, in a special way, in the recess yard after supper, which permitted a kind of behavior different from what we were accustomed to and no doubt favored the climate of respect and camaraderie in which we lived.
I owe a terrifying adventure to the complete works of Freud, which were in the library. I did not understand anything of his scabrous analyses, of course, but his clinical cases, like the fantasies of Jules Verne, kept me in suspense to the end. Professor Calderon asked us to write a story on any subject in Spanish class. One occurred to me about a mental patient, a girl of seven, with a pedantic title that was just the opposite of poetry: "A Case of Obsessive Psychosis." The teacher had it read in class. The boy next to me, Aurelio Prieto, rejected without reservations the presumptuousness of writing about so twisted a subject without the slightest scientific or literary training. I explained, with more rancor than humility, that I had taken it from a clinical case described by Freud in his memoirs, and my only intention had been to use it for the assignment. Maestro Calderon, perhaps believing I was resentful because of acid criticism from several of my classmates, called me aside during recess to encourage me to continue along the same path. He pointed out that in my story it was evident I knew nothing about the techniques of modern fiction, but I had the instinct and the desire. He thought it was well written, and at least it intended something original. For the first time he spoke to me of rhetoric. He gave me some practical thematic and metrical devices for versifying without pretensions, and he concluded that in any event I ought to continue writing even if only for my mental health. That was the first of the long conversations we held at recreational periods and other free times during my years at the liceo, to which I owe a great deal in my life as a writer.
It was an ideal climate for me. Beginning at the Colegio San Jose, the vice of reading everything I came across was so deep-seated that I spent my free time and almost all my time in classes doing just that. When I was sixteen, with good spelling or without it, I could repeat without pausing for breath the poems I had learned at the Colegio San Jose. I read and reread them with no help or order, and almost always in secret during classes. I believe I had read the entire indescribable library of the liceo, made up of the castoffs of other less useful ones: official collections, legacies of indifferent teachers, unsuspected books washed ashore from who knows what remnants of shipwrecks. I cannot forget the Aldeana Library of the Editorial Minerva, sponsored by Don Daniel Samper Ortega and distributed in elementary and secondary schools by the Ministry of Education. It consisted of one hundred volumes that contained all the good and all the worst written in Colombia until that time, and I proposed reading them in numerical order for as long as my heart could stand it. What still terrifies me today is that I almost achieved my goal in my last two years at the colegio, and for the rest of my life I have not been able to establish if it was of any use to me.
Dawns in the dormitory had a suspicious resemblance to happiness, except for the lethal bell that sounded the alarm--as we used to say--at six in the middle of the night. Only two or three mental defectives would jump out of bed to be first in line for the six showers of icy water in the dormitory bathroom. The rest of us used the time to squeeze out the last drops of sleep until the teacher on duty walked the length of the room pulling the blankets off the sleepers. It was an hour and a half of open intimacy for putting our clothes in order, polishing our shoes, taking a shower in the liquid ice from the pipe without a showerhead, while each of us shouted out his frustrations and made fun of those of the rest, violated romantic secrets, aired deals and disagreements, and agreed on the bartering in the dining room. The morning subject of constant discussions was the chapter read the night before.
Starting at dawn, Guillermo Granados gave free rein to his virtues as a tenor with an inexhaustible repertoire of tangos. With Ricardo Gonzalez Ripoll, my neighbor in the dormitory, we would sing duets of Caribbean guarachas to the rhythm of the rag we used to polish our shoes at the head of the bed, while my compadre Sabas Caravallo walked from one end of the dormitory to the other as naked as the day he was born, a towel hanging from his penis of reinforced concrete.
If it had been possible, a good number of us would have escaped in the middle of the night to keep dates planned on weekends. There were no night guards or dormitory monitors except for the teacher on duty for the week. And the eternal porter, Riveritos, who in reality always slept while he was awake and carrying out his daily duties. He lived in a room in the attic and did his work well, but at night we could unbar the heavy church doors, move them without any noise, enjoy the night in another house, and return a short while before dawn along the glacial streets. No one ever knew if Riveritos really slept like the dead man he s
eemed to be, or if it was his gallant way of being an accomplice to his boys. Not many escaped, and their secrets decayed in the memory of their faithful accomplices. I knew some who did this as a matter of routine, others who dared go once with a courage that filled them with the tension of the adventure, and returned exhausted by terror. We never knew of anyone who was caught.
My only social difficulty at school were the sinister nightmares inherited from my mother, which burst into other people's sleep like howls from beyond the grave. Students in the beds near me knew all about my nightmares and feared them only for the terror of the first howl in the silence of the night. The teacher on duty, who slept in a chamber made of cardboard, sleepwalked from one end of the dormitory to the other until calm was restored. The dreams not only were uncontrollable but had something to do with my bad conscience, because on two occasions they happened to me in bawdy houses. They were also indecipherable, because they did not occur in terrifying visions but in joyful episodes with ordinary persons or places that all at once revealed sinister information in an innocent glance. A nightmare that could not compare to one of my mother's, who held her own head in her lap and rid it of the nits and lice that did not allow her to sleep. My shouts were not cries of fear but calls for help so that someone would be kind enough to wake me. In the dormitory of the liceo there was no time for anything, because at the first moan the pillows thrown from nearby beds fell all over me. I would awake panting and with my heart in an uproar, but happy to be alive.
The best thing at the liceo were the books read aloud before we went to sleep. The readings had begun through the initiative of Professor Carlos Julio Calderon, with a story by Mark Twain that the fifth-year students had to study for an emergency exam first thing the next day. He read the four pages aloud in his cardboard cubicle so that the students who had not had time to read it could take notes. Interest was so great that from then on the custom was established of reading aloud every night before going to sleep. It was not easy at first, because some sanctimonious teacher had imposed the requirement that he choose and expurgate the books that would be read, but the danger of a rebellion left that to the judgment of the older students.
They began with half an hour. The teacher on duty would read in his well-lit room at the entrance to the general dormitory, and at first we would silence him with mocking snores, real or feigned, but almost always deserved. Later the readings were extended to an hour, depending on the interest of the story, and teachers were relieved by students in weekly shifts. The good times began with Nostradamus and The Man in the Iron Mask, which pleased everyone. What I still cannot explain is the thundering success of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which required the intervention of the rector to keep us from spending the whole night awake, waiting for Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat to kiss. Or the rare tension of all of us sitting up on our beds in order not to miss a word of the disordered philosophical duels between Naptha and his friend Settembrini. The reading that night lasted for more than an hour and was celebrated in the dormitory with a round of applause.
The only teacher who remained one of the great unknown quantities of my youth was the rector, whom I had met when I arrived. His name was Alejandro Ramos, a stern, solitary man who had eyeglasses with thick lenses that resembled a blind man's, and an unostentatious power that carried the weight of an iron fist in every one of his words. He came down from his refuge at seven in the morning to inspect our personal grooming before we went into the dining room. He wore impeccable clothes in vivid colors, a shirt collar starched as stiff as celluloid with bright ties, and resplendent shoes. He recorded any defect in our personal cleanliness with a grunt that was an order to return to the dormitory to correct it. The rest of the day he spent behind closed doors in his office on the second floor, and we did not see him again until the following morning at the same time, or as he walked the twelve paces between his office and the sixth-year classroom, where he taught his one mathematics class three times a week. His students said he was a genius with numbers and amusing in his classes, and he left them amazed at his knowledge and trembling with fear of his final examination.
A short while after my arrival, I had to write the inaugural address for some official ceremony at the liceo. Most of the teachers approved the topic but agreed that in such cases the rector had the final word. He lived at the top of the stairs on the second floor, but I suffered the distance as if it were a trip on foot around the world. I had not slept well the night before, I put on my Sunday tie, and I had no appetite for breakfast. My knocking on the rectory door was so slow that the rector did not open it until my third knock, and he stepped aside for me without a greeting. Just as well, because I would not have had the voice to reply, not only because of his brusqueness but because of the grandness, order, and beauty of his office with its furniture of noble woods and velvet upholstery, and its walls lined with astonishing bookcases filled with leatherbound volumes. The rector waited with formal solemnity until I caught my breath. Then he pointed to the visitor's easy chair in front of the desk, and he sat down in his.
I had prepared the explanation for my visit with almost as much attention as the address. He listened in silence, approved each sentence with a nod of his head, still not looking at me but at the paper trembling in my hand. At some point that I thought amusing I tried to win a smile from him, but it was useless. Even more: I am sure he already knew the reason for my visit but made me comply with the ritual of explaining it to him.
When I finished he extended his hand over the desk and accepted the paper. He removed his glasses in order to read it with profound attention, and he stopped only to make two corrections with his pen. Then he put on his glasses and spoke, not looking me in the eye, in a stony voice that made my heart pound.
"There are two problems here," he said to me. "You wrote: 'In harmony with the exhuberant flora of our country, which the learned Spaniard Jose Celestino Mutis revealed to the world in the eighteenth century, in this liceo we live in a paradisiacal environment.' But the fact is that exuberant is spelled without an h and paradisiacal has no accent mark."
I felt humiliated. I had no answer for the first objection but I had no doubt about the second, and without delay I replied with what remained of my voice:
"Excuse me, Senor Rector, the dictionary allows paradisiacal with or without an accent mark, but the dactyl seemed more sonorous to me."
He must have felt as assaulted as I did, because he still did not look at me but took the dictionary from the shelf without saying a word. My heart skipped a beat because it was the same Atlas that had belonged to my grandfather, but new and shining and perhaps unused. At the first try he opened it to the exact page, read and reread the entry, and asked me without looking up from the page:
"What year are you in?"
"Third," I said.
He slammed the dictionary shut with a bang and looked me in the eye for the first time.
"Bravo," he said. "Keep it up."
From that day on the only thing missing was for my classmates to proclaim me a hero, and with all the sarcasm possible they began to call me "the kid from the coast who talked to the rector." However, what affected me most in the interview was having confronted once again my personal drama with spelling. I never could understand it. One of my teachers tried to give me the coup de grace with the news that Simon Bolivar did not deserve his glory because of his terrible orthography. Others consoled me with the excuse that it is a problem for many people. Even today, when I have published seventeen books, my proofreaders honor me with the courtesy of correcting my spelling atrocities as if they were simple typographical errors.
Social gatherings in Zipaquira corresponded in general to the vocation and nature of each person. The salt mines, active when the Spaniards found them, were a tourist attraction on weekends, which were finished off with a brisket baked in the oven and snowy potatoes in large pans of salt. The boarders from the coast, with our well-deserved reputation for rowdiness and ill-breedin
g, had the good manners to dance like artists to popular music and the good taste to fall in love forever.
I became so spontaneous that on the day the end of the war was announced, we took to the streets in a show of jubilation with flags, placards, and shouts of victory. Someone asked for a volunteer to make a speech, and without giving it a second thought I went out to the balcony of the social club facing the main square and improvised one with bombastic shouts that many people thought had been memorized.
It was the only speech I found myself obliged to improvise in the first seventy years of my life. I ended with a lyrical tribute to each of the Big Four, but the one that attracted attention in the square was for the president of the United States, who had died a short while before: "Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, like El Cid, knows how to win battles after death." The sentence remained afloat in the city for several days and was reproduced on street posters and on portraits of Roosevelt in the windows of some stores. And so my first public success was not as a poet or a novelist but as an orator, and what is even worse, as a political orator. From then on there was no public ceremony at the liceo when they did not put me on a balcony, but now I had written speeches that had been corrected down to the last breath.