I did not expect help from my parents for another week, which meant that my suitcase would not move from the landing until the friends who could help me arrived. I sat down to wait in an archbishop's easy chair with large flowers printed on it that was like a gift from heaven after an entire day in the full sun on the truck of my misfortune. The truth was that no one was sure of anything during that time. Our agreeing to meet there on an exact day and at an exact hour lacked a sense of reality, because we did not dare say, even to ourselves, that half the country was involved in a bloody war that had been hidden in the provinces for several years, and open and lethal in the cities for the past week.
Eight hours later, stranded in the hotel in Cartagena, I did not understand what could have happened to Jose Palencia and his friends. After another hour of waiting with no word from them, I went out to wander the deserted streets. In April it gets dark early. The streetlights were already on, so dim they could be confused with stars through the trees. It was enough for me to take that first fifteen-minute aimless walk along the cobbled twists and turns of the colonial district to discover, with great relief in my chest, that this strange city had nothing to do with the canned fossil they described to us in school.
There was not a soul on the streets. The crowds who came in from the outskirts at dawn to work or sell returned in a rush to their neighborhoods at five in the afternoon, and the inhabitants of the walled enclosure shut themselves in their houses to eat supper and play dominoes until midnight. The custom of owning private cars had not yet been established, and the few for hire remained outside the wall. Even the haughtiest functionaries still arrived at the Plaza de los Coches in buses made by local artisans, and from there they made their way to their offices, jumping over the stores of trinkets displayed on the public sidewalks. One of the most affected governors during those tragic years boasted that he still traveled from his elite quarter to the Plaza de los Coches on the same buses he had taken to school.
The curbing of automobiles had been unavoidable because they were contrary to historical reality: they did not fit in the narrow, twisting streets of the city where the unshod hooves of rachitic horses resounded in the night. When it was very hot, when balconies were opened to let in the cool air from the parks, you could hear, with a spectral resonance, sudden bursts of the most intimate conversations. Dozing grandfathers heard furtive steps on the stone streets, paid attention to them without opening their eyes until they recognized them, and said in disappointment: "There goes Jose Antonio to see Chabela." The only thing that in reality drove the wakeful out of their minds were the dry knocks of the pieces on the domino table that echoed all through the walled district.
It was a historic night for me. I almost did not recognize in their reality the academic fictions from books, which had already been defeated by life. It moved me to tears that the old palaces of the marquises were the ones I saw in front of me, chipped and peeling, with beggars sleeping in the entrances. I saw the cathedral without the bells that had been carried off by the pirate Francis Drake to make cannons. The few that were saved from the assault were exorcised after the archbishop's sorcerers sentenced them to burn because of their malignant resonances meant to summon the devil. I saw the faded trees and the statues of illustrious heroes that did not seem like sculptures in perishable marble but living dead men. For in Cartagena they were not preserved from the rust of time; on the contrary, time was preserved for things that continued to be their original age while the centuries grew old. That was how, on the night of my arrival, the city revealed its own life to me with every step, not as the papier-mache fossil of the historians but as a flesh-and-blood city, no longer sustained by its martial glories but by the dignity of its ruins.
With that new spirit I returned to the pension as it was striking ten in the tower of El Reloj. The watchman, who was half asleep, told me that none of my friends had arrived, but that my suitcase was safe in the hotel's storeroom. I realized only then that I had not had anything to eat or drink since my meager breakfast in Barranquilla. My legs were giving way because of hunger, but I would have been content if the landlady had taken my suitcase and allowed me to sleep in the hotel that one night, even if it was on the armchair in the sitting room. The watchman laughed at my innocence.
"Don't be an asshole!" he said in raw Caribbean. "With the piles of money that madam has, she goes to sleep at seven and gets up the next day at eleven."
The argument seemed so legitimate to me that I sat on a bench in the Parque de Bolivar, on the other side of the street, and waited for my friends to arrive, not bothering anyone. The faded trees were almost invisible in the light from the street, because the lamps in the park were lit only on Sundays and important holidays. The marble benches had traces of legends often erased and rewritten by brazen poets. In the Palacio de la Inquisicion, behind its viceregal facade carved in virgin stone and its entrance of a sham basilica, you could hear the inconsolable lament of an ailing bird that could not be of this world. Then my longing to smoke attacked at the same time as my longing to read, two habits that I confused in my youth because of their intrusiveness and their tenacity. Point Counter Point, the novel by Aldous Huxley that physical fear had not allowed me to read on the plane, was sleeping under lock and key in my suitcase. And so I lit my last cigarette with a strange sensation of relief and terror, and I put it out half smoked to keep it on reserve for a night with no morning.
My mind was already prepared to sleep on the bench where I was sitting when it seemed to me that something was hidden in the deepest shadows of the trees. It was the equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar. No one else: General Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios, my hero since my grandfather had commanded me to idolize him, with his radiant dress uniform and his head of a Roman emperor, shat upon by pigeons.
He had continued to be my unforgettable protagonist despite his irredeemable inconsistencies, or perhaps because of them. After all, they were not comparable to those with which my grandfather won his colonel's rank and risked his life so many times in the war the Liberals fought against the same Conservative Party that Bolivar founded and sustained. I was lost in those mists when a peremptory voice behind me brought me down to earth:
"Hands up!"
I raised them in relief, certain my friends were there at last, and I encountered two police officers, rustic and somewhat ragged, who aimed their new rifles at me. They wanted to know why I had violated the curfew that had been in effect for the past two hours. I did not even know one had been imposed the previous Sunday, as they informed me, and I had not heard a bugle call or bells ring or any other sign that would have allowed me to understand why there was no one on the streets. The officers were more lazy than understanding when they saw my identity papers as I was explaining why I was there. They returned them without looking at them. They asked how much money I had and I said less than four pesos. Then the more resolute of the two asked for a cigarette and I showed them the butt I was planning to smoke before I went to sleep. He took it and smoked it down to his nails. After a while they led me by the arm along the street, more because of their desire to smoke than any stipulation of the law, looking for a place that was open where they could buy loose cigarettes for a centavo each. The night had become clear and cool under the full moon, and the silence seemed an invisible substance that could be breathed like air. Then I understood what Papa had told us so many times without our believing him--that he had practiced his late-night violin in the silence of the cemetery in order to feel that his waltzes of love could be heard all around the Caribbean.
Tired of the useless search for loose cigarettes, we went outside the wall toward a coastal shipping dock with its own life behind the public market, where the schooners from Curacao and Aruba and other Lesser Antilles dropped anchor. It was the all-night haunt for the most amusing and useful people in the city, who had the right to a safe-conduct pass in the curfew because of the kind of work they did. They ate until dawn at an
open-air stand with good prices and better company, because not only night workers went there but also everybody who wanted to eat when there was no other place open. It did not have an official name and it was known by the one that suited it least: La Cueva--the Cave.
The police walked in as if it were their house. It was evident that the patrons already seated at the table had always known one another and were happy to be together. It was impossible to detect any last names because they all called everyone by their school nicknames and talked at the top of their voices, all at the same time, without understanding or looking at anybody. They were in work clothes, except for an Adonis-like man in his sixties with a snow-white head, wearing a tuxedo from another day, with a mature and still very beautiful woman in a worn sequinned dress and too many real jewels. Her presence might have been a vivid fact of her status in life, because there were very few women whose husbands would permit them to appear in those places with bad reputations. One might have thought they were tourists if it had not been for their ease and their local accent and their familiarity with everyone. Later I learned that they were nothing like what they seemed but an old married couple, Cartagenians gone astray who dressed in formal clothes on any pretext in order to eat out, and that night they had found the headwaiters asleep and the restaurants closed because of the curfew.
They were the ones who invited us to supper. The others made room for us at the long table, and the three of us sat down, somewhat crowded and intimidated. They also treated the police officers with the familiarity used with servants. One was serious and confident and showed vestiges of a good upbringing at the table. The other seemed distracted except in eating and smoking. I, more because of timidity than courtesy, ordered fewer dishes than they did, and when I realized I would be left with more than half my hunger, the others had already finished.
The proprietor and only server in La Cueva was named Jose Dolores, an almost adolescent black of discomfiting beauty who was wrapped in the immaculate sheets of a Muslim and always wore a live carnation behind his ear. But the most notable thing about him was his excessive intelligence, which he used without qualms to be happy and to make other people happy. It was clear that he lacked very little to be a woman, and his reputation for going to bed only with his husband was well founded. No one ever made a joke about his circumstances, because his wit and rapid responses gave thanks for every favor and retaliation for every affront. He did everything himself, from cooking with exactitude what he knew each patron liked to frying the slices of green plantain with one hand and adding up the bills with the other, his only help the little he received from a boy of about six who called him mama. When we said goodbye I was excited by our discovery but never imagined that this spot for wayward night owls would be one of the unforgettable places in my life.
After the meal I accompanied the policemen while they completed their delayed rounds. The moon was a gold plate in the sky. A breeze was beginning to blow, and it brought from a great distance fragments of music and the remote shouts of uninhibited carousing. But the officers knew that in the poor districts nobody went to bed on account of the curfew; they organized subscription dances instead, in a different house each night, and did not go outside until dawn.
When the clocks struck two we stopped at my hotel, not doubting for a moment that my friends had arrived, but this time the watchman told us to go straight to hell for waking him up for no reason. Then they realized I had no place to sleep, and they decided to take me to their barracks. I thought the joke so shameless that I lost my temper and said something disrespectful. One of them, surprised by my childish reaction, put me in my place, pressing the barrel of his rifle against my stomach.
"Stop being an asshole," he said, weak with laughter. "Remember you're still under arrest for violating curfew."
And so I slept--in a cell for six and on a straw mat fermented by other people's sweat--on my first joyful night in Cartagena.
Reaching the soul of the city was much easier than surviving my first day. In less than two weeks I had resolved relations with my parents, who approved without reservation my decision to live in a city where there was no war. The landlady of the hotel, repentant for having condemned me to a night in jail, found a place for me with twenty other students in a shed she had constructed not long before on the roof of her beautiful colonial house. I had no reason to complain, because it was a Caribbean copy of the dormitory in the Liceo Nacional, and with everything included it cost less than the pension in Bogota.
Enrolling in the faculty of law was taken care of in an hour with an admission examination held before the secretary, Ignacio Velez Martinez, and a teacher of political economy whose name I have not managed to find in my memory. As was the custom, the ceremony was conducted in the presence of the entire second year. Beginning with the preamble, I was struck by the clear judgment and precise language of the two teachers, in a region famous in the interior of the country for its verbal disorder. The first subject, chosen by lot, was the Civil War in the United States, about which I knew a little less than nothing. It was a shame I had not yet read the new North American novelists, who had just begun to reach us, but it was my good luck that Dr. Velez Martinez began with a casual reference to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which I had known very well since my baccalaureate. I caught it on the wing. The two teachers must have suffered an attack of nostalgia, because the sixty minutes we had reserved for the examination were used in their entirety for an emotional analysis of the ignominy of the slaveholding regime in the southern United States. And that was as far as we got. So that what I had foreseen as a game of Russian roulette was a diverting conversation that received a good grade and some cordial applause.
I enrolled in the university to complete the second year of law, on the condition, which was never met, that I sit for makeup exams in one or two subjects still outstanding from my first year in Bogota. Some of my fellow students became enthusiastic about my way of domesticating subjects, because there existed among them a certain militancy in favor of creative freedom in a university mired in academic rigor. This had been my solitary dream every since the liceo, not because of gratuitous nonconformity but as my only hope for passing examinations without studying. But the same students who proclaimed independent thinking in the classrooms could not help but surrender to fate as they climbed the gallows of examinations, having memorized atavistic tomes of colonial texts. To our good fortune, in real life they were masters in the art of keeping alive the Friday subscription dances despite the dangers of a repression that grew more and more blatant in the shadow of the state of siege. The dances continued to be held while the curfew was in effect with the sub-rosa permission of the police authorities, and when it was canceled they came back to life with more spirit than ever. Above all in Torices, Getsemani, or the foot of La Popa, the most pleasure-loving districts during those gloomy years. All we had to do was look in the windows and choose the party we liked best, and for fifty centavos we danced until dawn to the hottest music in the Caribbean, amplified by clamoring loudspeakers. The girls invited as a courtesy were the same students we saw during the week as they came out of school, except that they wore their uniforms for Sunday Mass and danced like guileless women under the watchful eye of chaperoning aunts or liberated mothers. On one of those nights of big-game hunting, I was making my way through Getsemani, which had been the slave quarter in colonial times, when I recognized a strong slap on my back and a booming voice as if they were a password:
"Bandit!"
It was Manuel Zapata Olivella, an inveterate resident of the Calle de la Mala Crianza where the family of the grandparents of his African great-great-grandparents had lived. We had seen each other in Bogota, in the midst of the turmoil of April 9, and our first shock in Cartagena was finding the other alive. Manuel, in addition to being a charity doctor, was a novelist, a political activist, and a promoter of Caribbean music, but his principal calling was trying to resolve everyone else's problems. As soon as we had exchanged our e
xperiences on that fateful Friday, as well as our plans for the future, he proposed that I try my luck in journalism. One month earlier the Liberal leader Domingo Lopez Escauriaza had founded the newspaper El Universal, whose editor-in-chief was Clemente Manuel Zabala. I had heard about him, not as a journalist but as a scholar of all kinds of music, and as a Communist at rest. Zapata Olivella insisted we go to see him, because he knew he was looking for new people in order to provoke by example a creative journalism in opposition to the routine and submissive reporting that prevailed in the country, above all in Cartagena, which at that time was one of the most backward cities.
It was very clear to me that journalism was not my profession. I wanted to be a distinctive writer, but I was trying to achieve that through the imitation of other authors who had nothing to do with me. So that those days were an interval of reflection for me, because after the publication of my first three stories in Bogota and the high praise received from Eduardo Zalamea and other critics, and good and bad friends, I felt I had reached a dead end. Zapata Olivella insisted, despite my arguments, that journalism and literature were the same thing in the short run, and a connection with El Universal could assure me of three outcomes at the same time: it would resolve my life in a dignified and useful manner, place me in the environment of a profession that in and of itself was important, and allow me to work with Clemente Manuel Zabala, the best journalism teacher anyone could imagine. The constraints of shyness produced in me by this simple argument could have saved me from a misfortune. But Zapata Olivella did not know how to endure failure and he made an appointment with me for the following day at five in the afternoon at 381 Calle de San Juan de Dios, where the paper was located.
My sleep was restless that night. The next day at breakfast I asked the landlady of the hotel where Calle de San Juan de Dios was, and she pointed it out to me through the window.
"It's right there," she said, "two blocks away."