Among the friendships I still had from the university, that of Camilo Torres not only was the least forgettable but also the most dramatic of our youth. One day, for the first time, he did not attend classes. The reason spread like wildfire. He had arranged his things and decided to leave home for the seminary at Chiquinquira, some one hundred kilometers from Bogota. His mother overtook him at the railroad station and locked him in the library. I visited him there, and he was paler than usual and wearing a white poncho, and he had a serenity that for the first time made me think of a state of grace. He decided to enter the seminary because of a vocation he had hidden very well but was resolved to obey to the end.
"The most difficult part is over," he said.
It was his way of telling me that he had said goodbye to his girlfriend, and that she approved of his decision. After a resplendent afternoon he gave me an indecipherable gift: Darwin's On the Origin of Species. I said goodbye to him with the strange certainty I would not see him again.
I lost touch with him while he was in the seminary. I heard vague reports that he had gone to Lovaina for three years of theological training, that his devotion had not changed his student's spirit and lay manners, and that the girls who sighed for him treated him like a movie star who had been disarmed by a cassock.
Ten years later, when he returned to Bogota, he had assumed in body and soul the character of his investiture but preserved the best virtues of an adolescent. By then I was a writer and a journalist without a byline, married and with a son, Rodrigo, who had been born on August 24, 1959, in the Palermo Hospital in Bogota. At home we decided that Camilo should baptize him. His godfather would be Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, with whom my wife and I had long ago established a friendship of compadres. His godmother would be Susana Linares, the wife of German Vargas, who had transmitted to me his skills as a good reporter and a better friend. Camilo was closer to Plinio than we were and had been his friend for a much longer time, but he did not want to accept him as the godfather because of his kinship at the time with the Communists, and perhaps, too, because of his mocking spirit that might well destroy the solemnity of the sacrament. Susana agreed to be responsible for the spiritual formation of the child, and Camilo did not find, or did not wish to find, other arguments that would block the godfather's way.
The baptism took place in the chapel of the Palermo Hospital, in the icy gloom of six in the evening, with no one present except the godparents and I, and a campesino in a poncho and sandals who approached as if he were levitating in order to attend the ceremony without being noticed. When Susana arrived with the newborn, his incorrigible godfather let fly as a joke his first provocation:
"We're going to make this boy into a great guerrilla fighter."
Camilo, preparing the articles for the sacrament, counterattacked in the same tone: "Yes, but a guerrilla fighter for God." And he began the ceremony with the highest-caliber decisiveness, not at all usual in those years:
"I am going to baptize him in Spanish so that unbelievers can understand what this sacrament signifies."
His voice resonated in a high-sounding Castilian that I followed through the Latin of my early years as an altar boy in Aracataca. At the moment of the ablution, without looking at anyone, Camilo invented another provocative formula:
"Those who believe that at this moment the Holy Spirit has descended on this infant, let them kneel."
The godparents and I remained standing, perhaps somewhat discomfited by the glibness of our friend the priest, while the baby bellowed under the inflexible stream of water. The only one who kneeled was the campesino in sandals. The impact of this episode remained with me as one of the harsh reprimands in my life, because I have always believed that it was Camilo who brought in the campesino with complete premeditation in order to punish us with a lesson in humility. Or, at least, in good manners.
I saw him only a few times after that, and always for some valid and pressing reason, most of the time having to do with his charitable work to benefit those who suffered political persecution. One morning he appeared at my house soon after I had married, accompanied by a thief who had served his sentence, yet the police would not leave him in peace: they stole everything he had. Once I gave him a pair of hiking boots with a special design on the sole for greater safety. A few days later, the maid recognized the soles in the photograph of a street criminal who had been found dead in a ditch. It was our friend the thief.
I do not pretend that this episode had anything to do with Camilo's ultimate destiny, but months later he entered the military hospital to visit a sick friend, and nothing more was known about him until the government announced that he had reappeared as an ordinary guerrilla fighter in the Army of National Liberation. He died on February 5, 1966, at the age of thirty-seven, in open combat with a military patrol.
Camilo's entering the seminary coincided with my own decision not to go on wasting time in the faculty of law, but I did not have the courage to confront my parents once and for all. Through my brother Luis Enrique--who had come to Bogota with a good job in February 1948--I knew they were so satisfied with the results of my baccalaureate and my first year as a law student that they sent me the most lightweight and modern typewriter on the market as a surprise gift. The first one I ever had in this life, and also the most unfortunate, because that same day we pawned it for twelve pesos in order to continue the welcoming party with my brother and my friends from the pension. The next day, crazed with headaches, we went to the pawnshop to make certain the typewriter was still there with its seals intact, and to be sure it would remain in good condition until the money to redeem it rained down on us from heaven. We had a good opportunity with what my friend the false draftsman paid me, but at the last minute we decided to put off redeeming it. Each time my brother and I passed the pawnshop, together or alone, we would confirm from the street that the typewriter was still in its place, wrapped like a jewel in cellophane paper and an organdy bow, among rows of well-protected household appliances. After a month, the joyous calculations we had made in the euphoria of our drunkenness were still unfulfilled, but the typewriter was intact in its place and could remain there as long as we paid the quarterly interest.
I believe we were not yet aware of the terrible political tensions that were beginning to disturb the country. Despite the prestige as a moderate Conservative with which Ospina Perez came to power, most members of his party knew his victory had been possible only because of the division among the Liberals. And they, stunned by the blow, reproached Alberto Lleras for his suicidal impartiality that had made defeat possible. Dr. Gabriel Turbay, more overwhelmed by his depressive nature than by adverse votes, left for Europe without purpose or direction on the pretext of completing an advanced specialization in cardiology, and after a year and a half he died alone, struck down by the asthma of defeat among the paper flowers and faded tapestries of the Hotel Plaza Athenee in Paris. Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, on the other hand, did not interrupt for a single day his election campaign for the next term, but radicalized it in a fundamental way with a program of moral renewal of the Republic that went beyond the historic division of the country into Liberals and Conservatives, making it more profound with a horizontal and more realistic distinction between the exploiters and the exploited: the political country and the national country. With his historic slogan--"!A la carga!"*--and his supernatural energy, he sowed the seed of resistance even in the most remote places with a gigantic campaign of agitation that continued gaining ground until, in less than a year, it was on the verge of being an authentic social revolution.
Only in this way did we become aware that the country was beginning to slide into the abyss of the same civil war we had been fighting since our independence from Spain and that now was overtaking the great-grandchildren of its original protagonists. The Conservative Party, which had recovered the presidency because of Liberal divisions after four consecutive terms, was determined to use any means not to lose it again. To achieve this, the government
of Ospina Perez pushed forward a scorched-earth policy that bloodied the country and affected even daily life in people's homes.
Given my political unawareness and the height of my literary clouds, I had not even suspected this clear reality until one night when I was returning to the pension and encountered the phantom of my conscience. The deserted city, whipped by the glacial wind that blew along the openings in the hills, was swept by the metallic voice and intentional rough emphasis of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan in his obligatory Friday speech at the Teatro Municipal. Its capacity was no more than a thousand crowded people, but the speech was broadcast in concentric waves, first by the loudspeakers in adjacent streets and then by radios played at top volume that resounded like the lashes of a whip over the astonished city, and for three and even four hours overflowed onto a national audience.
That night I had the impression I was the only person on the streets, except at the crucial corner of the newspaper El Tiempo, protected as it was every Friday by a crowd of police armed as if for war. To me it was a revelation, for I had allowed myself the arrogance of not believing in Gaitan, and that night I understood all at once that he had gone beyond the Spanish country and was inventing a lingua franca for everyone, not so much because of what his words said as for the passion and shrewdness in his voice. In his epic speeches he himself would advise his listeners in a guileful paternal tone to return in peace to their houses, and they would translate that in the correct fashion as a coded order to express their repudiation of everything that represented social inequalities and the power of a brutal government. Even the police who had to maintain order were stirred by a warning that they interpreted in reverse.
The subject of that night's speech was an unadorned recounting of the devastation caused by official violence in its scorched-earth policy meant to destroy the Liberal opposition, with a still-incalculable number of killings by government forces in the rural areas, and entire populations of homeless, starving refugees in the cities. After a terrifying enumeration of murders and assaults, Gaitan began to raise his voice, to take delight word by word, sentence by sentence, in a marvel of sensationalist, well-aimed rhetoric. The tension in the audience increased to the rhythm of his voice, until a final outburst exploded within the confines of the city and reverberated on the radio into the most remote corners of the country.
The inflamed crowd poured into the street in a bloodless pitched battle, faced with the secret tolerance of the police. I believe that was the night when I understood at last the frustrations of my grandfather and the lucid analyses of Camilo Torres Restrepo. It surprised me that at the Universidad Nacional the students continued to be Liberals and Goths with knots of Communists, but the breach Gaitan was excavating in the country was not felt there. I reached the pension dazed by the turmoil of the night and found my roommate reading Ortega y Gasset in the peace of his bed.
"I'm a new man, Dr. Vega," I said. "Now I know how and why the wars of Colonel Nicolas Marquez began."
A few days later--on February 7, 1948--Gaitan held the first political ceremony I ever attended in my life: a procession for the countless victims of official violence in the country, with more than sixty thousand women and men in strict mourning, carrying the red flags of the party and the black flags of Liberal grief. There was only one rallying cry: absolute silence. And it was maintained with inconceivable dramatic effect, even on the balconies of residences and offices where people watched us walk along the eleven crowded blocks of the main avenue. Beside me a woman murmured a prayer to herself. A man nearby looked at her in surprise:
"Senora, please!"
She moaned an apology and sank into an ocean of phantoms. What brought me to the verge of tears, however, was the crowd's careful steps and breathing in the supernatural silence. I had come without political conviction, drawn by the curiosity of the silence, and the sudden knot of tears in my throat took me by surprise. Gaitan's speech on the Plaza de Bolivar, from the balcony of the municipal comptroller's office, was a funeral oration with an overwhelming emotional charge. Against the sinister predictions of his own party, he ended with the most hazardous circumstance of his rallying cry: there was no applause at all.
That was the "march of silence," the most moving of all the marches ever held in Colombia. The impression left after that historic afternoon, among his partisans and his enemies, was that Gaitan's election was unstoppable. The Conservatives knew it as well, because of the degree of depravity that the violence had reached all over the country, the ferocity shown by the regime's police against unarmed Liberalism, and its scorched-earth policy. The darkest manifestation of the country's state of mind was experienced that weekend by those who attended the bullfight in the Bogota arena, when the people in the bleachers invaded the bullring, indignant at the tameness of the bull and the inability of the bullfighter to kill it once and for all. The enraged crowd quartered the bull while it was still alive. Numerous reporters and writers who experienced the horror, or heard about it, interpreted this as the most frightening symptom of the brutal rage afflicting the country. In that climate of high tension the Ninth Pan-American Conference in Bogota opened on March 30, at four-thirty in the afternoon. The city had been renovated at enormous cost, following the pompous esthetic of Minister of State Laureano Gomez, who by virtue of his position was president of the conference. The ministers of state of all the countries in Latin America attended, as well as important personages of the time. The most eminent Colombian politicians were invited as guests of honor, with the unique exception of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, excluded no doubt by the very significant veto of Laureano Gomez, and perhaps by that of some Liberal leaders who despised him for his attacks on the oligarchy common to both parties. The polestar of the conference was General George Marshall, the delegate from the United States and the great hero of the recent war, who had the dazzling brilliance of a film star because he was directing the reconstruction of a Europe annihilated by the conflict.
But on Friday, April 9, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was the man of the day in the news because he had obtained the pardon of Lieutenant Jesus Maria Cortes Poveda, accused of killing the journalist Eudoro Galarza Ossa. Gaitan had been euphoric when he came to his law offices at the crowded intersection of Carrera Septima and Avenida Jimenez de Quesada, a little before eight in the morning, in spite of having been at court until the small hours. He had various appointments for the next few hours, but he accepted without hesitation when Plinio Mendoza Neira invited him to have lunch, a little before one o'clock, with six personal and political friends who had gone to his office to congratulate him for the legal victory that the newspapers had not published yet. Among them was his personal physician, Pedro Eliseo Cruz, who was also a member of his political inner circle.
In that intense atmosphere, I sat down to have lunch in the dining room of the pension where I lived, less than three blocks away. They had not yet served the soup when Wilfrido Mathieu came and stood in horror at my table.
"The country's fucked," he told me. "They just killed Gaitan in front of El Gato Negro."
Mathieu was an exemplary student of medicine and surgery, a native of Sucre like other residents in the pension, who suffered from sinister premonitions. Less than a week before he had announced that the most imminent and terrible one, because of its devastating consequences, might be the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. But this did not impress anyone because you did not need premonitions to suppose that would happen.
I almost did not have the heart to race across the Avenida Jimenez de Quesada and arrive breathless at the cafe El Gato Negro, almost at the corner of Carrera Septima. They had just taken the wounded man, still alive but without hope of surviving, to the Clinica Central, some four blocks away. A group of men were dipping their handkerchiefs into the pool of warm blood to keep as historical relics. A woman in a black shawl and espadrilles, one of the many who sold trinkets in the area, held a bloody handkerchief and growled:
"Sons of bitches, they went and killed him."
Bands of bootblacks armed with their wooden boxes tried to knock down the metal gates of the Granada drug store, where the few police on duty had locked away the attacker to protect him from the angry mob. A tall man, very much in control of himself and wearing an irreproachable gray suit as if he were going to a wedding, urged them on with well-calculated shouts that were so effective the owner of the pharmacy had raised the metal gates for fear they would burn the store. The attacker, clutching a police officer, succumbed to panic at the sight of the maddened crowds rushing toward him.
"Officer," he pleaded, almost without a voice, "don't let them kill me."
I will never be able to forget him. He had disheveled hair, a two-day beard, a dead man's gray color, and eyes that bulged with terror. He had a very worn brown suit with vertical stripes, its lapels ripped by the first tugs of the mob. It was an instantaneous and eternal apparition, because the bootblacks tore him away from the police with blows of their boxes and then kicked him to death. The first time he went down he had lost a shoe.