In the middle of the year Pablo Neruda came to Bogota, convinced that poetry had to be a political weapon. In his Bogotan tertulias he learned what kind of reactionary Laureano Gomez was, and as a farewell he composed, almost as fast as his pen could write, three punitive sonnets in his honor, the first quatrain setting the tone for all of them:
Farewell, Laureano unwreathed in laurel,
melancholy satrap and upstart king.
Farewell, O emperor of the fourth floor,
paid in advance, without end, forever more.
In spite of his right-wing sympathies and personal friendship with Laureano Gomez, Carranza highlighted the sonnets in his literary pages, more as a journalistic scoop than a political proclamation. But the negative response was almost unanimous. Above all because of the illogicality of publishing them in the paper of a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like the former president Eduardo Santos, who was as opposed to the retrograde thought of Laureano Gomez as he was to Pablo Neruda's revolutionary ideas. The noisiest reaction came from those who could not tolerate a foreigner permitting himself that kind of abuse. The mere fact that three casuistic sonnets, more ingenious than poetic, could set off such a storm was a heartening symptom of the power of poetry during those years. In any event, Laureano Gomez himself, who was then president of the Republic, later prohibited Neruda from entering Colombia, as did General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in his day, but he was in Cartagena and Buenaventura, ports of call for the steamships between Chile and Europe, on several occasions. For the Colombian friends to whom he announced his visit, each stopover on the round trip was a reason for stupendous celebration.
When I enrolled in the faculty of law in February 1947, my identification with the Stone and Sky group remained unshaken. Although I had met its most notable members in Carlos Martin's house in Zipaquira, I did not have the audacity to remind even Carranza of that, and he was the most approachable. On one occasion I happened to see him in the Libreria Grancolombia, so close to me and so accessible that I greeted him as an admirer. His response was very cordial but he did not recognize me. On the other hand, on another occasion, Maestro Leon de Greiff got up from his table at El Molino and greeted me at mine when someone told him I had published stories in El Espectador, and he promised to read them. Sad to say, a few weeks later the popular uprising of April 9 took place, and I had to leave the still-smoking city. When I returned after four years, El Molino had disappeared under its ashes, and the maestro had moved with all his household goods and his court of friends to the cafe El Automatico, where we became friends of books and aguardiente, and he taught me to move chessmen without art or good fortune.
My friends from an earlier time found it incomprehensible that I would persist in writing stories, and even I could not explain it in a country where the greatest art was poetry. I learned this when I was very young through the success of "Miseria humana," a popular poem sold in folded sheets of coarse wrapping paper or recited for two centavos in the markets and cemeteries of Caribbean towns. The novel, on the other hand, was limited. After Maria, by Jorge Isaacs, many had been written with no great resonance. Jose Maria Vargas Vila had been an unusual phenomenon with his fifty-two novels aimed at the heart of the poor. A tireless traveler, his excessive baggage consisted of his own books that were displayed and bought up by passionate readers in the entrances to the hotels of Latin America and Spain. Aura, or The Violets, his stellar novel, broke more hearts than many better ones by his contemporaries.
The only novels that survived their own time were The Ram, written between 1600 and 1638 during the colonial period by the Spaniard Juan Rodriguez Freyle, a tale so unrestrained and free about the history of Nueva Granada* that it became a masterpiece of fiction; Maria, by Jorge Isaacs, in 1867; The Vortex, by Jose Eustasio Rivera, in 1924, The Marquise of Yolombo, by Tomas Carrasquilla, in 1926, and Four Years Aboard Myself, by Eduardo Zalamea, in 1934. None of them had even glimpsed the glory possessed, deservedly or not, by so many poets. On the other hand, the short story--with an antecedent as distinguished as Carrasquilla himself, the great writer of Antioquia--had come to grief on a craggy and soulless rhetoric.
The proof that my vocation was to be only a narrator was the stream of verses I left behind at the liceo, unsigned or signed with pseudonyms, because I never had the intention of dying on their account. Even more: when I published my first stories in El Espectador, many people who had no right to were challenging the genre. Today I think this is understandable because from many points of view, life in Colombia was still in the nineteenth century. Above all in the lugubrious Bogota of the 1940s, still nostalgic for the colonial period, when I matriculated without vocation or desire in the faculty of law at the Universidad Nacional.
To confirm this it was enough to sink into the nerve center of Carrera Septima and Avenida Jimenez de Quesada, baptized by Bogotan excess as the best corner in the world. When the public clock in the tower of the Church of San Francisco struck twelve noon, men stopped on the street or interrupted their conversation in the cafe to set their watches by the official hour of the church. Around that intersection, and on the adjacent streets, were the crowded places where businessmen, politicians, journalists--and poets, of course--met twice a day, all of them dressed in black down to the soles of their feet, like our lord King Don Felipe IV.
In my time as a student, you could still read a newspaper in that spot that perhaps had few predecessors in the world. It was a blackboard, like the ones used in schools, displayed on the balcony of El Espectador at twelve and at five in the afternoon, with the latest news written in chalk. At those hours the passage of streetcars became difficult, if not impossible, for they were obstructed by the waiting, impatient crowds. Those street readers also had the opportunity to deliver a unanimous ovation when they thought the news was good and jeer or throw stones at the blackboard when they did not. It was a form of instantaneous democratic participation that gave El Espectador a thermometer more efficient than any other for taking the temperature of public opinion.
Television did not yet exist, and there were radio newscasts that were very complete but aired at fixed times, and so before you went to have lunch or dinner, you stood and waited for the blackboard to appear so you could go home with a more complete version of the world. That was where the solo flight of Captain Concha Venegas between Lima and Bogota was announced and followed with exemplary and unforgettable rigor. When the news was like that, the blackboard was changed several times outside its scheduled hours in order to feed special bulletins to a voracious public. None of the street readers of that unique newspaper knew that the inventor and faithful follower of the idea was named Jose Salgar, a twenty-year-old novice reporter at El Espectador who became one of the great journalists without having gone beyond primary school.
Bogota's distinctive institution were the cafes in the center of the city, where sooner or later the life of the entire country would converge. In its time, each one enjoyed a specialty--political, literary, financial--so that a large part of Colombia's history during those years had some connection to the cafes. Each person had his favorite as an infallible sign of his identity.
Writers and politicians in the first half of the century--including an occasional president of the Republic--had studied in the cafes along Calle Catorce, across from the Colegio del Rosario. The Windsor, which made history with its famous politicians, was one of the longest lasting and a refuge for the great caricaturist Ricardo Rendon, who did his major work there, and years later used a revolver to put a bullet through his inspired head in the back room of the Gran Via.
In contrast to my many afternoons of tedium was the accidental discovery of a music room open to the public at the Biblioteca Nacional. I made it my favorite refuge for reading in the shelter of great composers whose works we requested in writing from a charming clerk. Those of us who were habitual visitors discovered all kinds of affinities with one another according to the type of music we preferred. In this way I became acquainted with m
ost of my favorite authors through other people's tastes, which were abundant and varied, and I despised Chopin for many years because of an implacable melomaniac who requested him without mercy almost every day.
One afternoon I found the room deserted because the sound system was out of order, but the woman in charge of the room permitted me to sit and read in the silence. At first I felt that I was in a peaceful oasis, but after almost two hours I had not been able to concentrate because of flashes of uneasiness that interfered with my reading and made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin. It took me several days to realize that the remedy for my uneasiness was not the silence in the room but the ambience of music, which from then on became an almost secret and permanent passion for me.
On Sunday afternoons, when the music room was closed, my most fruitful diversion was riding on the streetcars with blue windows that for five centavos traveled without stopping from La Plaza de Bolivar to Avenida Chile, and where I spent those adolescent afternoons that seemed to trail behind them an endless train of many other lost Sundays. The only thing I did during that journey in vicious circles was to read books of poetry, perhaps a city block for each block of verses, until the first lights were turned on in the perpetual rain. Then I made the rounds of the taciturn cafes in the old neighborhoods in search of someone who would have the charity to talk to me about the poems I had just read. At times I found him--it was always a man--and we would stay until after midnight in some dismal hole, finishing the butts of the cigarettes that we ourselves had smoked and talking about poetry while in the rest of the world all of humanity was making love.
At that time everyone was young, but we were always meeting others who were younger than we. The generations shoved one another, above all the poets and the criminals, and no sooner had you done something than someone else appeared who threatened to do it better. At times I find among old papers a few of the photos taken of us by street photographers in the atrium of the Church of San Francisco, and I cannot repress a roar of compassion, because they do not seem like pictures of us but of our children, in a city of closed doors where nothing was easy, least of all surviving Sunday afternoons without love. That was where I happened to make the acquaintance of my uncle, Jose Maria Valdeblanquez, when I thought I saw my grandfather making his way with his umbrella through the Sunday crowd coming out of Mass. His attire could not in any way disguise his identity: a three-piece suit of black wool, a white shirt with a celluloid collar, a tie with diagonal stripes, a vest with a watch chain, a bowler hat, gold-rimmed glasses. The impression was so strong that I blocked his way without realizing it. He raised his menacing umbrella and held it a hand span away from my eyes:
"Can I pass?"
"Pardon me," I said in embarrassment. "I mistook you for my grandfather."
He continued scrutinizing me with his astronomer's gaze and asked with a roguish irony:
"And can one know who this famous grandfather is?"
Confused by my own insolence, I said his complete name. Then he lowered the umbrella and smiled with very good humor.
"Well, there's a reason we look alike," he said. "I'm his oldest son."
Daily life was more bearable at the Universidad Nacional. But I cannot find the reality of that time in my memory because I do not think I was a law student even for a single day, though my grades for the first year--the only one I completed in Bogota--might lead one to believe the opposite. There was no time or opportunity to establish the kind of personal relationships we had at the liceo, and my fellow students scattered throughout the city when classes were over. My most pleasant surprise was finding that the general secretary of the faculty of law was the writer Pedro Gomez Valderrama, whom I knew about because of his early contributions to literary pages, and who was one of my great friends until his premature death.
My most assiduous fellow student beginning with the first year was Gonzalo Mallarino Botero, the only one accustomed to believing in certain wonders in life that were true even though they were not factual. It was he who showed me that the faculty of law was not as sterile as I thought, because after the first day he took me out of the class on statistics and demography, at seven in the morning, and challenged me to a personal poetic duel in the cafe on the university campus. In the wasted hours of the morning he would recite from memory the poems of the Spanish classics, and I responded with poems by the young Colombians who had opened fire on the rhetorical remnants of the previous century.
One Sunday he invited me to his house, where he lived with his mother and sisters and brothers in an atmosphere of fraternal tensions like those in my father's household. Victor, the oldest, was already dedicated to the theater and recognized in the Spanish-speaking world for his recitations. I had escaped the tutelage of my parents but had not felt at home again until I met Pepa Botero, the mother of the Mallarinos, an untamed Antioquian woman in the hermetic heart of the Bogotan aristocracy. With her natural intelligence and prodigious talk she had a peerless faculty for knowing the precise spot where curse words recover their Cervantine ancestry. They were unforgettable afternoons, watching dusk fall on the boundless emerald of the savanna, in the hospitable warmth of perfumed chocolate and warm crullers. What I learned from Pepa Botero, with her untrammeled slang and the manner in which she said the things of ordinary life, was invaluable to me for a new rhetoric of real life.
Other kindred fellow students were Guillermo Lopez Guerra and Alvaro Vidales Baron, who had been my accomplices at the liceo in Zipaquira. But at the university I was closer to Luis Villar Borda and Camilo Torres Restrepo, who struggled, with bare hands and for love of the art, to put out the literary supplement of La Razon, an almost secret paper published by the poet and journalist Juan Lozano y Lozano. On the days the paper went to press I would go with them to the newsroom and give them a hand in last-minute emergencies. Sometimes I was there at the same time as the publisher, whose sonnets I admired, and even more so his biographical sketches of national figures, which he published in the magazine Sabado. He recalled with a certain vagueness Ulises's note about me but had not read any of my stories, and I evaded the subject because I was sure he would not like them. Beginning on the first day, he would say as he left that the pages of his newspaper were open to me, but I took this only as Bogotan correctness.
In the Cafe Asturias, Torres Restrepo and Villar Borda, my fellow students, introduced me to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who at the age of sixteen had published a series of lyrical prose pieces, the fashionable genre imposed on the country by Eduardo Carranza from the literary pages of El Tiempo. He had tanned skin and straight, deep-black hair, which accentuated his Indian appearance. In spite of his age he had succeeded in acquiring a reputation for his articles in the weekly magazine Sabado, founded by his father, Plinio Mendoza Neira, a former minister of war and a great born journalist who may not have written a complete line in his whole life. But he taught many others to write their own at newspapers that he established with great fanfare and then abandoned for high political posts or in order to found other enormous and catastrophic enterprises. I did not see his son more than two or three times during that period, and always with fellow students of mine. I was surprised that at his age he talked like an old man, but it never would have occurred to me to think that years later we would share so many days of reckless journalism, for the lure of journalism as an occupation had not yet occurred to me, and as a science it interested me even less than the law.
In reality I never had thought it would ever interest me until one day when Elvira Mendoza, Plinio's sister, held an emergency interview with the Argentine dramatic performer Berta Singerman, which altogether transformed my prejudices against the profession and revealed a vocation I did not know I had. More than a traditional interview of questions and answers--about which I had so many misgivings, and still do--it was one of the most original ever published in Colombia. Years later, when Elvira Mendoza was a renowned international journalist and one of my good friends, she told me it had been a despe
rate measure to salvage a disaster.
The arrival of Berta Singerman had been the news event of the day. Elvira--who edited the women's section in Sabado--asked for authorization to interview her, which she received with some hesitation on her father's part because of her lack of experience in the genre. The editorial offices at Sabado were a meeting place for the best-known intellectuals in those years, and Elvira asked them for some questions to use in the interview, but she was on the verge of panic when she had to face the scorn with which Singerman received her in the presidential suite of the Hotel Granada.
From the beginning, Singerman took pleasure in rejecting the questions as foolish or imbecilic, not suspecting that behind each one was a good writer, one of the many she knew and admired from her various visits to Colombia. Elvira, who always had a lively temperament, was obliged to swallow her tears and endure the rebuff. The unexpected entrance of Berta Singerman's husband saved the interview, for he managed the situation with exquisite tact and a good sense of humor just when it was about to turn into a serious incident.
Elvira did not write the dialogue she had foreseen, based on the diva's responses, but instead wrote an article about her difficulties with Berta Singerman. She took advantage of the providential intervention of the husband and turned him into the real protagonist of the meeting. Singerman went into one of her historic rages when she read the interview. But Sabado was already the most popular weekly magazine, and its circulation sped upward to a hundred thousand copies in a city of six hundred thousand inhabitants.