These new works were displayed in the unreachable windows of bookstores, but some copies circulated in the student cafes, which were active centers of cultural dissemination for university students from the provinces. Many of them had their places reserved year after year and received mail and even postal money orders there. Some favors from the owners, or their trusted employees, were decisive in saving a good many university careers. Numerous professionals in the country may owe more to them than to their invisible tutors.
I preferred El Molino, the cafe frequented by older poets, only some two hundred meters from my pension and on the crucial corner of Avenida Jimenez de Quesada and Carrera Septima. They did not allow students a fixed table, but you could be sure of learning more and learning it better than in textbooks from the literary conversations we listened to as we huddled at nearby tables. It was an enormous cafe, well turned out in the Spanish style, and its walls had been decorated by the painter Santiago Martinez Delgado with episodes from the battle of Don Quixote against the windmills. Although I did not have a reserved place, I always arranged for the waiters to put me as close as possible to the great master Leon de Greiff--bearded, gruff, charming--who would begin his tertulia* at dusk with some of the most famous writers of the day, and end it with his chess students at midnight, awash in cheap liquor. Very few of the great names in the country's arts and letters did not sit at that table, and we played dead at ours in order not to miss a single word. Although they tended to talk more about women or political intrigues than about their art or work, they always said something new for us to learn. The most attentive of us were from the Atlantic coast, united less by Caribbean conspiracies against the Cachacos than by the vice of books. One day Jorge Alvaro Espinosa, a law student who had taught me to navigate the Bible and made me learn by heart the complete names of Job's companions, placed an awesome tome on the table in front of me and declared with his bishop's authority:
"This is the other Bible."
It was, of course, James Joyce's Ulysses, which I read in bits and pieces and fits and starts until I lost all patience. It was premature brashness. Years later, as a docile adult, I set myself the task of reading it again in a serious way, and it not only was the discovery of a genuine world that I never suspected inside me, but it also provided invaluable technical help to me in freeing language and in handling time and structures in my books.
One of my roommates was Domingo Manuel Vega, a medical student who had been my friend ever since Sucre and who shared my voracity in reading. Another was my cousin Nicolas Ricardo, the oldest son of my uncle Juan de Dios, who kept alive for me the virtues of the family. One night Vega came in with three books he had just bought, and he lent me one chosen at random, as he often did to help me sleep. But this time the effect was just the opposite: I never again slept with my former serenity. The book was Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in the false translation by Borges published by Losada in Buenos Aires, that determined a new direction for my life from its first line, which today is one of the great devices in world literature: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." These were mysterious books whose dangerous precipices were not only different from but often contrary to everything I had known until then. It was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice. It was Scheherazade all over again, not in her millenary world where everything was possible but in another irreparable world where everything had already been lost.
When I finished reading The Metamorphosis I felt an irresistible longing to live in that alien paradise. The new day found me at the portable typewriter that Domingo Manuel Vega had lent me, attempting to write something that would resemble Kafka's poor bureaucrat changed into an enormous cockroach. In the days that followed, I did not go to the university for fear the spell would be broken, and I continued sweating drops of envy until Eduardo Zalamea Borda published in his pages a disconsolate commentary lamenting the fact that the new generation of Colombian writers lacked memorable names, and that nothing could be detected in the future that might remedy the situation. I do not know with what right I felt challenged, in the name of my generation, by the provocation in that commentary, but I took up the abandoned story again in an attempt at rectification. I elaborated the plot idea of the conscious corpse in The Metamorphosis but relieved it of its false mysteries and ontological prejudices.
In any event, I felt so uncertain I did not dare talk it over with any of my tablemates. Not even with Gonzalo Mallarino, my fellow student at the faculty of law, who was the only reader of the lyrical prose pieces that I wrote to endure the tedium of my classes. I reread and corrected my story until I was exhausted, and at last I wrote a personal note to Eduardo Zalamea--whom I had never seen--of which I cannot recall even a single letter. I put everything in an envelope and brought it in person to reception at El Espectador. The concierge authorized me to go up to the second floor to hand the letter to Zalamea himself, but the mere idea paralyzed me. I left the envelope on the concierge's desk and fled.
This happened on a Tuesday, and I was not troubled by any presentiments regarding the fate of my story, but I was certain that in the event it was published, it would not happen very soon. In the meantime, for two weeks I rambled and roamed from cafe to cafe to allay my Saturday-afternoon apprehension until September 13, when I went into El Molino and collided with the title of my story printed across the full width of El Espectador, which had just come out: "The Third Resignation."
My first reaction was the devastating certainty that I did not have the five centavos to buy the paper. This was the most explicit symbol of my poverty, because many basic things in daily life, in addition to the newspaper, cost five centavos: the trolley, the public telephone, a cup of coffee, a shoeshine. I rushed out to the street with no protection against the imperturbable drizzle, but in the nearby cafes there was no one I knew to give me a charitable coin. And I did not find anyone in the pension at that dead hour on Saturday except the landlady, which was the same as not finding anyone because I owed her seven hundred twenty times five centavos for two months of room and board. When I went out again, prepared for anything, I encountered a man who came from Divine Providence and was getting out of a cab, holding El Espectador in his hand, and I asked him straight out if he would give it to me.
And so I could read my first story in print, with an illustration by Hernan Merino, the official sketch artist for the paper. I read it hiding in my room, my heart pounding, in a single breath. In each line I was discovering the crushing power of print, for what I had constructed with so much love and pain as a humble parody of a universal genius was revealed to me as an obscure and weak monologue barely sustained by three or four consolatory sentences. Almost twenty years had to go by before I dared read it a second time, and my judgment then--not tempered by compassion--was much less indulgent.
The most difficult thing was the avalanche of glowing friends who invaded my room with copies of the newspaper and unrestrained praises for a story I was certain they had not understood. Among my fellow students at the university, some appreciated it, others had less understanding, still others with more reason did not go past the fourth line, but Gonzalo Mallarino, whose literary judgment it was not easy for me to place in doubt, approved it without reservation.
My greatest uneasiness had to do with the verdict of Jorge Alvaro Espinosa, whose critical blade was the most dangerous even beyond our immediate circle. I had contradictory feelings: I wanted to see him right away to resolve my uncertainty once and for all, but at the same time the idea of facing him terrified me. He disappeared until Tuesday, which was not strange in an insatiable reader, and when he reappeared in El Molino he began talking to me not about the story but about my audacity.
"I suppose you realize the trouble you've gotten into," he said to me, fixing his green king-cobra eyes on
mine. "Now you're in the showcase of recognized writers, and there's a lot you have to do to deserve it."
I was petrified by the only opinion that could affect me as much as that of Ulises. But before he finished, I had decided to move ahead of him with what I considered then, and always considered since, to be the truth:
"That story is a piece of shit."
He replied with immutable control that he could not say anything yet because he had only had time to glance at it. But he explained that even if it was as bad as I said, it was not bad enough to sacrifice the golden opportunity that life was offering me.
"In any case, that story already belongs to the past," he concluded. "What matters now is the next one."
He left me flabbergasted. I was foolish enough to look for contrary arguments until I became convinced I was not going to hear advice more intelligent than his. He expounded on his fixed idea that you first had to conceive of the story and then the style, but one depended on the other in a mutual servitude that was the magic wand of the classics. He spent some time on his opinion, repeated so often, that I needed to read the Greeks in a profound, unbiased way, and not only Homer, the only one I had read for the baccalaureate because I was obliged to. I promised I would, and I wanted to hear other names, but he changed the subject and began to talk about Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, which he had read that weekend. I never found the courage to tell him that perhaps our conversation had determined my life. I stayed up all night making notes for the next story, which would not have the meanders of the first one.
I suspected that those who talked to me about it were impressed not so much by the story--which perhaps they had not read and certainly had not understood--as by its being published in an unusual display on so important a page. To begin with, I realized that my two great defects were the two greatest defects: the clumsiness of my writing and my ignorance of the human heart. And they were more than evident in my first story, which was a confused, abstract meditation made worse by my abuse of invented emotions.
Searching my memory for situations from real life for the second story, I remembered that one of the most beautiful women I had known as a child told me that she wished she could be inside the very handsome cat that she was caressing on her lap. I asked her why, and she answered: "Because it is more beautiful than I am." Then I had a point of departure for the second story, and an attractive title: "Eva Is Inside Her Cat." The rest, as in the previous story, was invented out of nothing, and for the same reason--as we liked to say in those days--both carried within them the seeds of their own destruction.
This story was published with the same display as the first, on Saturday, October 25, 1947, and illustrated by a rising star in the Caribbean sky, the painter Enrique Grau. I was struck that my friends accepted this as something routine for a renowned writer. I, on the other hand, suffered over the errors, doubted the successes, but managed to keep my hope alive. The high point came a few days later with a note published by Eduardo Zalamea employing his usual pseudonym, Ulises, in his daily column in El Espectador. It came straight to the point: "Readers of 'Fin de Semana,' the literary supplement of this newspaper, will have noted the appearance of a new and original talent with a vigorous personality." And further on: "In the imagination everything can happen, but knowing how to show with naturalness, simplicity, and without fuss the pearl produced there is not something that all twenty-year-old boys just beginning their relationship with letters can accomplish." And he concluded without hesitation: "With Garcia Marquez a new and notable writer has been born."
The note--how could it not!--brought a shock of happiness, but at the same time it disturbed me that Zalamea had not left himself any way out. Now everything was complete, and I had to interpret his generosity as a call to my conscience that would last the rest of my life. The note also revealed that Ulises had discovered my identity through one of his colleagues in the newsroom. That night I learned it had been through Gonzalo Gonzalez, a close cousin to my closest cousins, who sat five meters from Eduardo Zalamea's desk and for fifteen years had written for the same paper, with the pseudonym Gog and with sustained passion, a column that answered questions from readers. To my good fortune Zalamea did not search me out, and I did not search him out. I saw him once at the table of the poet De Greiff and recognized his voice and the harsh cough of an irredeemable smoker, and I was close to him at various cultural events, but no one introduced us. Some because they did not know us and others because they did not think it possible we did not know each other.
It is difficult to imagine the degree to which people lived then in the shadow of poetry. It was a frenzied passion, another way of being, a fireball that went everywhere on its own. We would open the paper, even the business section or the legal page, or we would read the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup, and there was poetry waiting to take over our dreams. So that for us aborigines from every province, Bogota was the capital of the country and the seat of government, but above all it was the city where poets lived. We not only believed in poetry, and would have died for it, but we also knew with certainty--as Luis Cardoza y Aragon wrote--that "poetry is the only concrete proof of the existence of man."
The world belonged to the poets. Their new works were more important for my generation than the political news that was more and more depressing. Colombian poetry had emerged from the nineteenth century illuminated by the solitary star of Jose Asuncion Silva, the sublime romantic who at the age of thirty-one shot himself with a pistol through the circle that his doctor had painted for him with a swab of iodine over his heart. I was not born in time to know Rafael Pombo or Eduardo Castillo--the great lyric poet--whose friends described him as a ghost escaped from his tomb at dusk, with his long cape, a skin turned green by morphine, and the profile of a turkey buzzard: the physical representation of the poetes maudits. One afternoon I was in a streetcar that passed a large mansion on Carrera Septima, and in the entrance I saw the most memorable man I had ever seen in my life, wearing an impeccable suit, an English hat, dark glasses for his lightless eyes, and a cattleman's poncho. He was the poet Alberto Angel Montoya, a rather ostentatious romantic who published some of the good poems of his time. For my generation they were ghosts from the past, except for Maestro Leon de Greiff, on whom I spied for years at the Cafe El Molino.
None of them succeeded in even touching the glory of Guillermo Valencia, an aristocrat from Popayan who, before he was thirty, established himself as the supreme pontiff of the Generation of the Centenario, so called for having come upon the scene in 1910, the hundredth anniversary of national independence. His contemporaries Eduardo Castillo and Porfirio Barba Jacob, two great poets in the romantic tradition, did not receive the critical justice they more than deserved in a country dazzled by the marble rhetoric of Valencia, whose mythic shadow barred the way for three generations. The generation just before ours, which emerged in 1925 with the name and drive of The New Ones, had magnificent models like Rafael Maya and, once again, Leon de Greiff, who were not recognized in all their greatness as long as Valencia sat on his throne. Until that time he had enjoyed a peculiar glory that carried him to the very doors of the presidency of the Republic.
The only ones who dared oppose him were the poets from the group Stone and Sky with their juvenile chapbooks, who in the final analysis only had in common the virtue of not being Valencistas: Eduardo Carranza, Arturo Camacho Ramirez, Aurelio Arturo, and Jorge Rojas, who had financed the publication of their poems. They were not all the same in form or inspiration, but as a group they made the archaeological ruins of the Parnassians tremble and brought to life a new poetry of the heart, with multiple resonances of Juan Ramon Jimenez, Ruben Dario, Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, or Vicente Huidobro. Public acceptance was not immediate, and they themselves did not seem aware that they were viewed as being sent by Divine Providence to clean poetry's house. But Don Baldomero Sanin Cano, the most respected essayist and critic of those years, hastened to write a categorical essay to thwart any at
tempt against Valencia. His proverbial moderation went astray. Among many definitive judgments, he wrote that Valencia had "come into possession of ancient knowledge in order to know the soul of times distant in the past, and he ponders contemporary texts in order to discover, by analogy, the entire soul of man." He consecrated Valencia once again as a timeless poet with no frontiers and placed him among those who, "like Lucretius, Dante, Goethe, preserved his body in order to save his soul." More than one person must have thought then that with friends like this, Valencia did not need enemies.
Eduardo Carranza replied to Sanin Cano with an article that said it all, beginning with the title: "A Case of Bardolatry." It was the first well-aimed assault to situate Valencia within his proper limits and bring his pedestal down to its correct place and size. Carranza accused Valencia of having lit not a flame of the spirit in Colombia but rather an orthopedics of words, and he defined his verses as those of an artist who was precious, frigid, accomplished, and a painstaking carver. His conclusion was a question to himself that in essence was like one of his good poems: "If poetry does not make my blood run faster, open sudden windows for me onto the mysterious, help me discover the world, accompany this desolate heart in solitude and in love, in joy and in enmity, what good is poetry to me?" And he concluded: "For me--blasphemer that I am!--Valencia is barely a good poet."
The publication of "A Case of Bardolatry" in the "Lecturas Dominicales" section of El Tiempo, which had a wide circulation at the time, caused a social upheaval. It also had the prodigious result of producing a thorough examination of poetry in Colombia from its origins, which perhaps had not been done with any seriousness since Don Juan de Castellanos wrote the 150,000 hendecasyllables of his Elegies to Illustrious Men of the Indies.
From then on the sky was the limit for poetry. Not only for The New Ones, who became fashionable, but for others who emerged later and jostled and shoved for their place. Poetry became so popular that today it is not possible to understand to what extent you lived for each issue of "Lecturas Dominicales," published by Carranza, or Sabado, published at the time by Carlos Martin, our former rector at the liceo. In addition to his poetry, with his glory Carranza established a way of being a poet at six in the afternoon on the Carrera Septima in Bogota, which was like walking in a shop window ten blocks long holding a book in the hand that rested on your heart. He was a model for his generation, which created a school in the next, each in its own way.