The sangfroid and ingenuity with which Elvira Mendoza used Berta Singerman's foolishness to reveal her true personality set me to thinking for the first time about the possibilities of journalism, not as a primary source of information but as much more: a literary genre. Before many years passed I would prove this in my own flesh, until I came to believe, as I believe today more than ever, that the novel and journalism are children of the same mother.
Until then I had risked only poetry: satiric verses in the magazine of the Colegio San Jose and lyrical prose or sonnets of imaginary love in the manner of Stone and Sky in the single issue of the paper at the Liceo Nacional. A short while before, Cecilia Gonzalez, my accomplice from Zipaquira, had persuaded the poet and essayist Daniel Arango to publish a little ballad I had written, using a pseudonym and seven-point type, in the most obscure corner of El Tiempo's Sunday supplement. Its publication did not move me or make me feel like more of a poet than I already was. On the other hand, Elvira's article made me aware of the reporter I carried sleeping in my heart, and I resolved to wake him. I began to read newspapers in a different way. Camilo Torres and Luis Villar Borda, who agreed with me, repeated Don Juan Lozano's offer of his pages in La Razon, but I dared submit only a couple of technical poems that I never considered mine. They suggested I speak to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza about Sabado, but my tutelary shyness warned me that I still had far to go before I could risk a new occupation about which I had no more than a dim understanding. Yet my discovery had an immediate usefulness, because at the time I was entangled in the unhappy awareness that everything I wrote in prose or in verse, and even my assignments at the liceo, were shameless imitations of Stone and Sky, and I proposed a thorough change beginning with my next story. In the end experience convinced me that adverbs of means that end in -mente* are a bankrupt habit. I began to correct them whenever I ran across them, and each time I became more convinced that this obsession was obliging me to find richer and more expressive forms. For a long time there have not been any in my books except for an occasional quotation. I do not know, of course, if my translators have detected and also acquired, for occupational reasons, this stylistic paranoia.
My friendship with Torres Restrepo and Villar Borda soon overflowed the limits of classrooms and newsrooms, and we spent more time together on the street than at the university. Both of them were simmering over a slow fire in a stubborn lack of conformity with the political and social situation of the country. Enthralled by the mysteries of literature, I did not even try to understand their circular analyses and gloomy premonitions, but the memory of their friendship is among the most gratifying and useful of those years.
In the classes at the university, on the other hand, I foundered. I always regretted my lack of devotion to the merits of the teachers with great names who endured our boredom. Among them was Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, the son of the only Colombian president in the twentieth century to be reelected, and I believe this gave rise to the general impression that he too was predestined by birth to be president, as in fact he was. He came to his introductory class on the law with an irritating punctuality and some splendid cashmere jackets made in London. He lectured without looking at anyone, with that celestial air of intelligent myopics who always seem to be walking through someone else's dreams. His classes seemed like monologues on a single note, which is what any class not about poetry was for me, but the tedium of his voice had the hypnotic power of a snake charmer. His vast literary knowledge had a reliable foundation, and he knew how to use it in his writing and speaking, but I began to appreciate it only when we met again years later and became friends far from the lethargy of the classroom. His prestige as an inveterate politician was nourished by his almost magical personal charm and a dangerous lucidity in discovering the hidden intentions of people. Above all those he liked least. But his most outstanding virtue as a public man was his astonishing ability to create historic situations with a single phrase.
In time we achieved a close friendship, but at the university I was not the most assiduous and diligent student, and my irremediable shyness kept me at a hopeless distance, in particular with people I admired. For all these reasons I was surprised to be called to the first-year final examination despite the absences that had earned me a reputation as an invisible student. I turned to my old stratagem of deviating from the subject with rhetorical devices. I realized that the teacher was aware of my trick, but perhaps he appreciated it as a literary diversion. The only stumbling block was that in the agony of the exam I used the word prescription and he hastened to ask that I define it to be sure I knew what I was talking about.
"To prescribe is to acquire a property over the course of time," I said.
He asked without hesitation:
"To acquire it or to lose it?"
It was the same thing, but I did not argue with him because of my congenital insecurity, and I believe it was one of his celebrated after-dinner jokes, because in the grading he did not penalize me for my indecision. Years later I mentioned the incident to him and he did not remember it, of course, but by then neither he nor I was even sure the episode was true.
We both found in literature a retreat where we could forget about politics and the mysteries of prescription, and we would discover surprising books and forgotten writers in infinite conversations that would sometimes ruin visits and exasperate our wives. My mother had convinced me that we were related, and it was true. But more than any kind of lost relationship, our shared passion for vallenatos connected us.
Another fortuitous relative, on my father's side, was Carlos H. Pareja, a professor of political economy and the owner of the Libreria Grancolombia, a favorite of students because of its admirable custom of displaying new books by great authors on open, unguarded tables. Even his own students would invade the shop during the negligent moments at twilight, and we would make the books disappear by sleight of hand, following the students' code that says that stealing books is a crime but not a sin. Not because of virtue but physical fear, my role in these raids was limited to watching the backs of the more dexterous, on the condition that in addition to books for themselves, they would take a few that I had indicated. One afternoon, one of my accomplices had just stolen The City Without Laura, by Francisco Luis Bernardez, when I felt a fierce claw on my shoulder and heard a sergeant's voice:
"At last, damn it!"
I turned around in terror and confronted Maestro Carlos H. Pareja while three of my accomplices escaped in a stampede. It was my good luck that before I could beg his pardon, I realized that he had not caught me for a thief but because he had not seen me in his class for more than a month. After a more or less conventional reprimand, he asked:
"Is it true that you're Gabriel Eligio's son?"
It was true, but I told him it was not, because I knew that his father and mine were in fact estranged because of a personal incident I never understood. But later he learned the truth, and from that day on he pointed me out in the bookstore and in classes as his nephew, and we maintained a relationship more civil than literary in spite of the fact that he had written and published several books of uneven verse under the pseudonym Simon Latino. The awareness of our relationship, however, was helpful to him only because I no longer offered my services as a screen for stealing his books.
Another excellent teacher, Diego Montana Cuellar, was the opposite of Lopez Michelsen, with whom he seemed to have a secret rivalry, Lopez as a straying Liberal and Montana Cuellar as a left-wing radical. I maintained good relations with him outside the classroom, and it always seemed to me that Lopez Michelsen viewed me as a poetic dove, while Montana Cuellar saw me as a good prospect for his revolutionary proselytizing.
My fondness for Montana Cuellar began because of a difficulty he encountered with three young officers from the military school who attended his classes in parade uniform. They had the punctuality of the barracks, sat together on the same seats apart from the rest, took implacable notes, and obtained well-deserved grades on rigo
rous examinations. After the first few days Diego Montana Cuellar advised them in private not to come to class in battle uniforms. They replied with their best manners that they were obeying the orders of their superiors, and they lost no opportunity to let him feel the weight of that. In any case, aside from their peculiarities, it was always clear to students and teachers that the three officers were outstanding students.
They arrived in their identical uniforms, impeccable, always together, and punctual. They sat to one side and were the most serious and methodical students, but it always seemed to me that they were in a world different from ours. If you spoke to them, they were attentive and polite, but their formality was invincible: they said no more than answers to what they had been asked. When we had exams, we civilians would divide into groups of four to study in cafes, we would meet at the Saturday dances, at the student stone-throwing fights, in the tame taverns and dreary brothels of the period, but we never ran into our military fellow students.
I almost never exchanged greetings with them during the long year when we were all at the university. Besides, there was no opportunity, because they came to classes right on time and left at the teacher's last word, not mixing with anyone except other young soldiers in the second year, whom they would join during rest periods. I never learned their names or heard anything else about them. Today I realize that the reticence was not so much theirs as mine, for I never could overcome the bitterness with which my grandparents had evoked their frustrated wars and the atrocious slaughters of the banana companies.
Jorge Soto del Corral, the teacher of constitutional law, was famous for knowing by heart all the constitutions of the world, and in class he kept us dazzled by the brilliance of his intelligence and legal erudition, marred only by a limited sense of humor. I believe he was one of the teachers who did everything possible to keep their political opinions from cropping up in class, but they were more evident than they themselves believed, even in the gestures of their hands and the emphasis placed on their ideas, for it was in the university where one felt with greatest clarity the profound pulse of a country that was on the verge of a new civil war after some forty years of armed peace.
In spite of my chronic absenteeism and judicial negligence, I passed the easy first-year law courses with overheated last-minute cramming, and the more difficult ones by using my old trick of eluding the subject with clever devices. The truth is I was not comfortable in my own skin and did not know how to continue groping my way along that dead-end street. I understood the law less and had much less interest in it than any of the subjects at the liceo, and I felt I was enough of an adult to make my own decisions. In short, after sixteen months of miraculous survival, all I had was a group of good friends for the rest of my life.
My scant interest in my studies was even scantier after the note by Ulises, above all at the university, where some of the other students began to call me Maestro and introduced me as a writer. This coincided with my resolve to learn how to build a structure that was credible and fantastic at the same time but had no cracks. With perfect distant models, like Sophocles' Oedipus the King, whose protagonist investigates the murder of his father and ends up discovering that he himself is the murderer; like "The Monkey's Paw," by W. W. Jacob, the perfect story in which everything that happens is accidental; like Maupassant's Boule de suif and so many other great sinners, may God keep them in His holy kingdom. I was involved in this one Sunday night when at last something happened to me that deserved to be recounted. I had spent almost the entire day venting my frustrations as a writer with Gonzalo Mallarino in his house on the Avenida Chile, and when I was returning to the pension on the last streetcar a flesh-and-blood faun got on at the Chapinero station. No mistake: I said a faun. I noticed that none of the few passengers at midnight seemed surprised to see him, and this made me think he was just another of the men in costume who sold a variety of things on Sundays in the children's parks. But reality convinced me I could have no doubts, because his horns and beard were as wild as those of a goat, and when he passed I could smell the stink of his pelt. Before Calle 26, the street where the cemetery was located, he got off with the manners of a good paterfamilias and disappeared among the trees in the park.
After half a night of being awakened by my tossing and turning in bed, Domingo Manuel Vega asked me what was wrong. "It's just that a faun got on the streetcar," I told him, half asleep. He was wide awake when he replied that if it was a nightmare, it must be due to Sunday's poor digestion, but if it was the subject for my next story, he thought it was fantastic. The next morning I did not know if in reality I had seen a faun on the streetcar or if it had been a Sunday hallucination. I began by admitting I had fallen asleep, tired at the end of the day, and had a dream that was so clear I could not separate it from reality. But in the end, the essential thing for me was not if the faun was real but that I had lived the experience as if he were. And for the same reason--real or dreamed--it was not legitimate to consider this as a bewitchment of the imagination but as a marvelous experience in my life.
And so I wrote it the next day in one sitting, put it under my pillow, and read it and reread it for several nights before I went to sleep and in the mornings when I woke up. It was a bare, literal transcription of the episode on the streetcar, just as it occurred and in a style as innocent as the announcement of a baptism on the society page. At last, hounded by new doubts, I decided to submit it to the infallible test of print, not in El Espectador but in the literary supplement of El Tiempo. Perhaps it was a way to encounter a judgment different from that of Eduardo Zalamea, and to not involve him in an adventure he had no reason to share. I sent the story with a friend from the pension, along with a letter for Don Jaime Posada, the new and very young editor of the "Suplemento Literario" of El Tiempo. But the story was not published and my letter was not answered.
My stories of that period, in the order in which they were written and published in Fin de Semana, disappeared from the archives of El Espectador in the assault on and burning of that newspaper by government mobs on September 6, 1952. I had no copies, nor did my most conscientious friends, so I thought with a certain sense of relief that they had been burned by oblivion. But some provincial literary supplements had reproduced them at the time without authorization, and others were published in a variety of magazines, until they were collected in a single volume by Ediciones Alfil of Montevideo in 1972, with the title of one of the stories: Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait.
One was missing that has never been included in a book, perhaps for lack of a reliable version: "Tubal Cain Forges a Star," published by El Espectador on January 17, 1948. The name of the protagonist, as not everyone knows, is that of a biblical blacksmith who invented music. There were three stories. Read in the order in which they were written and published, they seemed to me inconsequential and abstract, some absurd, and none based on real feelings. I never could establish the judgment with which a critic as severe as Eduardo Zalamea read them. Yet for me they have an importance they do not have for anyone else, for in each one there is something that corresponds to the rapid evolution of my life during this time.
Many of the novels I was reading then, and which I admired, interested me only because of their technical lessons. That is: their secret carpentry. From the metaphysical abstractions of the first three stories to the last three of that period, I have found precise and very useful clues to the elementary formation of a writer. The idea of exploring other forms had not even passed through my mind. I thought that the story and the novel not only were different literary genres but two organisms with natures so diverse it would be fatal to confuse them. Today I still believe that, and I am convinced more than ever of the supremacy of the short story over the novel.
The publications in El Espectador, on the margins of literary success, created other more terrestrial and amusing problems for me. Misguided friends would stop me in the street to ask for the loans that would save them, since they could not believe th
at a writer displayed with so much prominence had not received enormous sums for his stories. Very few believed the truth when I told them I had never been paid a centavo for their publication nor had I expected it, because that was not the custom in the country's press. Even more serious was my papa's disappointment when he became convinced I could not take over my own expenses when three of the eleven children who had already been born were in school. The family sent me thirty pesos a month. The pension alone cost me eighteen with no right to eggs at breakfast, and I always found myself obliged to dip into that money for unforeseen expenses. I do not know where I had acquired the habit of making unconscious sketches in the margins of newspapers, on the napkins in restaurants, on the marble tables in cafes. I dare to believe that those drawings were direct descendants of the ones I had painted as a child on the walls of my grandfather's workshop, and that perhaps they were easy outlets for my feelings. A casual acquaintance from El Molino with enough influence at a ministry to be placed as a draftsman without having the slightest idea about drawing proposed that I do the work for him and we divide the salary. Never again in my life was I so close to being corrupted, but not so close that I repented.
My interest in music also grew at this time, when the popular songs of the Caribbean--which I had taken in with my mother's milk--were making their way into Bogota. The radio program with the largest audience was The Coastal Hour, animated by Don Pascual Delvecchio, a kind of musical consul of the Atlantic coast in the capital. It had become so popular on Sunday mornings that we students from the Caribbean would go to dance in the offices of the radio station until late in the afternoon. That was the origin of the immense popularity of our music in the interior of the country, and then even in its most remote corners, and of social advancement in Bogota for students from the coast.
The only disadvantage was the phantom of obligatory marriage. I do not know what wicked precedents had advanced the coastal belief that the girls in Bogota were loose with boys from the coast and set traps for us in bed so that we would be obliged to marry them. And not for love but because they hoped to live with a window facing the sea. I never believed it. On the contrary, the most disagreeable memories of my life are the sinister brothels on the outskirts of Bogota where we would go to drain away our gloomy bouts of drunkenness. In the most sordid of them, I almost left behind the little life I had inside me when a woman I had just been with appeared naked in the corridor, shouting that I had stolen twelve pesos from a drawer in her dressing table. Two thugs from the house knocked me down, and not satisfied with emptying my pockets of the two pesos I had left after a ruinous lovemaking, they stripped me of everything including my shoes to search every inch for the stolen money. In any event, they had decided not to kill me but to turn me over to the police when the woman remembered that the day before she had changed the hiding place for her money, and she found it intact.