Living to Tell the Tale

  The offices of El Universal were across from the immense wall of golden stone of the Church of San Pedro Claver, the first saint from the Americas, whose uncorrupted body has been displayed for more than a hundred years beneath the main altar. It was an old colonial building embroidered with republican patches, and two large doors, and windows through which you could see everything that the newspaper was. But my real terror sat behind an unpolished wooden railing some three meters from the window: a mature, solitary man dressed in white drill, with a jacket and tie, a swarthy complexion, and the coarse black hair of an Indian, who was writing with a pencil at an old desk that had stacks of papers needing attention. I passed by again in the opposite direction, feeling an urgent fascination, and then two more times, and the fourth time, as on the first, I did not have the slightest doubt that the man was Clemente Manuel Zabala, just as I had supposed him to be, but more frightening. Terrified, I made the simple decision not to keep that afternoon's appointment with a man you only had to see through a window to discover that he knew too much about life and its professions. I returned to the hotel and presented myself with another of my typical days without regret, lying on my back on the bed with Gide's The Counterfeiters, and smoking without letup. At five in the afternoon, the door to the dormitory was shaken by an open palm delivering a blow as dry as a rifle shot.

  "Let's go, damn it!" Zapata Olivella shouted at me from the entrance. "Zabala's waiting for you, and nobody in this country can allow himself the luxury of standing him up."

  The beginning was more difficult than I could have imagined in a nightmare. Zabala received me not knowing what to do, smoking without pause, his uneasiness made worse by the heat. He showed us everything. On one side, the offices of the publisher and the manager, on the other the newsroom and typesetting shop with three empty desks at that early hour, and in the rear a rotary printing press that had survived a riot, and their only two linotypes.

  My great surprise was that Zabala had read my three stories, and Zalamea's note had seemed fair to him.

  "Not to me," I said. "I don't like the stories. I wrote them on somewhat unconscious impulses, and after I read them in print I didn't know how to continue."

  Zabala inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs and said to Zapata Olivella:

  "That's a good sign."

  Manuel seized the opportunity and said I could be useful at the paper in the time I had free from the university. Zabala said he had thought the same thing when Manuel asked him to make an appointment with me. He introduced me to Dr. Lopez Escauriaza, the publisher, as the possible contributor about whom he had spoken the night before.

  "That would be wonderful," said the publisher with his eternal smile of an old-fashioned gentleman.

  We did not arrange anything but Maestro Zabala asked me to come back the next day to meet Hector Rojas Heraza, a fine poet and painter and his star columnist. Because of a timidity that today I find inexplicable, I did not tell him he had been my drawing teacher at the Colegio San Jose. When we left, Manuel gave a great leap on the Plaza de la Aduana, across from the imposing facade of San Pedro Claver, and exclaimed with premature jubilation:

  "You see, tiger, the whole thing's taken care of!"

  I responded with a cordial hug so as not to disillusion him, but I had serious doubts about my future. Then Manuel asked me what I had thought of Zabala, and I told him the truth. He seemed like a fisher of souls to me. Perhaps that was a determining reason for the groups of young people who were nourished by his reason and circumspection. I concluded, no doubt with the false estimation of a premature old man, that perhaps this disposition of his had prevented him from playing a decisive role in the public life of the country.

  Manuel called me that night weak with laughter because of a conversation he had with Zabala, who spoke of me with great enthusiasm, reiterated his certainty that I would be an important acquisition for the editorial page, and said the publisher was of the same opinion. But the real reason for his call was to tell me that the only thing that disturbed Maestro Zabala was that my unhealthy timidity might be a great obstacle to me in my life.

  If at the last minute I decided to go back to the paper, it was because the next morning one of my roommates opened the door to the shower and held the editorial page of El Universal up to my eyes. There was a terrifying note about my arrival in the city, which committed me as a writer before I was one and as an imminent journalist less than twenty-four hours after I had seen the inside of a newspaper for the first time. I reproached Manuel, who called me without delay to congratulate me, and I did not hide my anger at his writing something so irresponsible without speaking to me first. But something changed in me, perhaps forever, when I learned that it was Maestro Zabala who had written the note in his own hand. And so I fastened my trousers and went back to the newsroom to thank him. He paid little attention. He introduced me to Hector Rojas Herazo, with his khaki pants and shirt with Amazonian flowers and enormous words fired off in a voice of thunder, who did not yield in a conversation until he had trapped his prey. He, of course, did not recognize me as one more of his students at the Colegio San Jose in Barranquilla.

  Maestro Zabala--as everyone called him--put us in his orbit with memories of two or three mutual friends, and some others whom I ought to know. Then he left us alone and returned to the fierce battle of his blood-red pencil and his urgent papers, as if he had never had anything to do with us. Hector continued talking to me in the light drizzling noise of the linotypes as if he had never had anything to do with Zabala either. He was an infinite conversationalist with a dazzling verbal intelligence, an adventurer of the imagination who invented improbable realities that he himself came to believe. We talked for hours about other friends living and dead, about books that never should have been written, about women who forgot us and whom we could not forget, about the idyllic beaches in the Caribbean paradise of Tolu--where he had been born--and about the infallible wizards and biblical misfortunes of Aracataca. About everything that had been and should be, not drinking, almost not taking a breath, and smoking without pause for fear that life would not last long enough for everything we still had to talk about.

  At ten o'clock that night, when the paper went to press, Maestro Zabala put on his jacket, tightened his tie, and with a ballet dancer's step that had little youth left in it, he invited us to eat. At La Cueva, of course, where to their surprise Jose Dolores and several of his late-night diners recognized me as an old patron. Their surprise increased when one of the policemen from my first visit passed by, made an equivocal joke about the bad night I had spent at the barracks, and confiscated a pack of cigarettes I had just opened. Hector, in turn, started a tourney of double entendres with Jose Dolores that had the other patrons bursting with laughter while Maestro Zabala maintained a contented silence. I dared interject a reply without wit that at least allowed me to be recognized as one of the few clients Jose Dolores favored by serving them on credit up to four times a month.

  After the meal, Hector and I continued the afternoon's conversation on the Paseo de los Martires, which faced the bay polluted by republican garbage from the public market. It was a splendid night at the center of the world, and the first schooners from Curacao were dropping anchor in secret. That night Hector gave me my first insights into the underground history of Cartagena, concealed by sympathetic friends, which perhaps resembled the truth more than the amiable fiction of the academics. He told me about the lives of the ten martyrs whose marble busts were on both sides of the promenade as a memorial to their heroism. The popular version--which seemed to be his--was that when they were set in their original places, the sculptors had not carved the names and dates on the busts but on the pedestals. When they were dismantled to be cleaned for their centenary, no one knew which busts corresponded to which names and dates, and they had to be put back on the pedestals at random because no one knew who they were. The story had circulated as a joke for many years, but I, on the contrary, thought it had been an act
of historical justice to erect a monument to heroes who were nameless not so much because of the lives they had lived as because of the destiny they had shared.

  Those nights without sleep were repeated almost on a daily basis during my years in Cartagena, but after the first two or three I realized that Hector had the power of immediate seduction, with a sense of friendship so complex that only those of us who loved him a good deal could understand it without reservation. For his tenderheartedness was unqualified, but at the same time he was capable of deafening and at times catastrophic rages, which he celebrated afterward with the innocence of the Holy Infant. One understood then how he was, and why Maestro Zabala did everything possible to have us love him as much as he did. On that first night, as on so many others, we stayed on the Paseo de los Martires until dawn, protected from the curfew because of our status as reporters. Hector's voice and memory were intact when he saw the radiance of the new day on the sea's horizon, and he said:

  "If only tonight would end like Casablanca."

  He did not say anything else, but his voice brought back to me in all its splendor the image of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walking shoulder to shoulder through the fog at dawn toward the radiant light on the horizon, and the now legendary sentence of that tragic happy ending: "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

  Three hours later Maestro Zabala woke me by telephone with a less happy phrase:

  "How's that masterpiece coming along?"

  I needed a few minutes to understand that he was referring to my piece for the next day's paper. I do not remember our having closed any deal or my having said either yes or no when he asked me to write my first contribution, but that morning I felt capable of anything after the verbal Olympiad of the previous night. Zabala must have understood matters in this way, because he already had indicated some current topics and I proposed another that seemed more immediate: the curfew.

  He gave me no orientation. My intention was to recount the adventure of my first night in Cartagena, which is what I did, in my own hand, because I could not manage the prehistoric typewriters in the newsroom. It took almost four hours to produce, and the maestro revised it in front of me without any expression that would reveal his thinking, until he found the least bitter way to tell me:

  "It's not bad, but publishing it is impossible."

  I was not surprised. On the contrary, I had foreseen it, and for a few minutes I was relieved of the unpleasant burden of being a journalist. But his real reasons, which I did not know, were conclusive: since April 9, in every newspaper in the country, beginning at six in the evening, a government censor installed himself at a desk in the newsroom as if he were in his own house, with the intention and the power not to authorize a single letter that might interfere with public order.

  Zabala's motives weighed on me much more than the government's, because I had written not a press commentary but a subjective recounting of a personal incident with no pretensions to editorial journalism. Further, I had treated the curfew not as a legitimate instrument of the state but as the pretext for ignorant police officers to obtain cigarettes for a centavo each. It was my good fortune that before condemning me to death, Maestro Zabala returned the article, which I had to rewrite from top to bottom, not for him but for the censor, and he had the charity to pronounce a two-edged verdict.

  "It has literary merit, there's no question," he said. "But we'll talk about that later."

  That is how he was. From my first day at the paper, when Zabala conversed with me and with Zapata Olivella, I was struck by his unusual habit of talking to one while looking in the face of the other as his nails were singed by the burning end of his cigarette. At first this caused an uncomfortable insecurity in me. The least foolish thing that occurred to me, out of sheer timidity, was to listen to him with real attention and enormous interest, and not look at him but at Manuel in order to draw my own conclusions from both of them. Afterward, when we spoke with Rojas Herazo, and then with the publisher Lopez Escauriaza, and with so many others, I realized it was Zabala's own method for conversing in a group. I understood it in this way, and in this way he and I could exchange ideas and feelings through unwary accomplices and innocent intermediaries. With the confidence of many years I dared to tell him about this impression of mine, and he explained with no surprise that he looked at the other person almost in profile so as not to blow cigarette smoke in his face. That is how he was: I never met anyone with so peaceable and reserved a nature, with a temperament as civil as his, because he always knew how to be what he wanted to be: a wise man in the shadows.

  In reality, I had written speeches, premature verses at the liceo in Zipaquira, patriotic proclamations, petitions to protest the bad food, and very little else, not counting the letters to my family that my mother would send back with the spelling corrected even when I had been recognized as a writer. The piece that at last was published on the editorial page had nothing to do with the one I had written. Between the emendations of Maestro Zabala and those of the censor, what remained of mine were some scraps of lyrical prose lacking discernment or style and finished off by the grammatical sectarianism of the proofreader. At the last minute we agreed on a daily column, perhaps to delimit responsibilities, with my complete name and a permanent title: "Period. New Paragraph."

  Zabala and Rojas Herazo, already accustomed to the daily grind, managed to console me for my disheartening first article, and so I dared to follow it with a second and a third, which were no better. I stayed in the newsroom for almost two years, publishing as many as two daily articles that I managed to get past the censorship, signed and unsigned, until I was ready to marry the censor's niece.

  I still ask myself what my life would have been without the pencil of Maestro Zabala and the tourniquet of censorship, whose mere existence was a creative challenge. But the censor was more on his guard than we were because of his delusions of persecution. Citations from great authors seemed like suspicious ambushes to him, which in fact they often were. He saw phantoms. He was a second-rate student of Cervantes who inferred imaginary meanings. One night, under his unlucky star, he had to go to the toilet every quarter of an hour until he dared to tell us he was going crazy because of the shocks we caused him.

  "Damn it!" he shouted. "With these runs I won't have an asshole left!"

  The police had been militarized as another demonstration of the government's severity in the political violence that was bleeding the country, though there was a certain degree of moderation on the Atlantic coast. But at the beginning of May, without reasons either good or bad, the police harassed a procession on the streets of Carmen de Bolivar, about twenty leagues from Cartagena. I had a sentimental weakness for the town, where my Aunt Mama had grown up and where my grandfather Nicolas had invented his celebrated little fish of gold. With unusual determination Maestro Zabala, who had been born in the neighboring town of San Jacinto, gave me editorial management of the news item without regard for censorship and with all its consequences. My first unsigned article on the editorial page demanded that the government hold a thorough investigation of the aggression and punish those responsible. And it ended with a question: "What happened in Carmen de Bolivar?" Faced with official scorn, and now in open warfare with censorship, we continued repeating the question with growing energy in a daily article on the same page, prepared to make the government much more irascible than it already was. After three days, the publisher of the paper verified with Zabala that he had consulted the entire editorial staff and agreed that we ought to continue with the subject. And so we continued asking the question. In the meantime, the only thing we heard from the government reached us through a leak: they had given orders to leave us alone with our lunatics-at-large subject until we ran out of steam. It was not easy, because the question we asked every day was already on the street as a popular greeting: "Hey, brother, what happened in Carmen de Bolivar?"

  One night when we least expected it, without any announcement, an army p
atrol closed Calle de San Juan de Dios with a huge clamor of voices and weapons, and Colonel Jaime Polania Puyo, commander of the militarized police, strode into the building of El Universal. He wore the meringue-white uniform used on important occasions, and patent leather gaiters, and his sword was tied with a silken cord, and his buttons and insignias were so brilliant they looked like gold. In no way was he unworthy of his reputation for elegance and charm, though we knew he was a hard man in peace and in war, as he demonstrated years later at the head of the Colombia battalion in the Korean War. No one moved in the two intense hours he spoke behind closed doors to the publisher. They drank twenty-two cups of black coffee, without cigarettes or alcohol because both men were free of vices. When he left, the colonel seemed even larger as he said goodbye to us one by one. He took a little longer with me, looked straight into my eyes with his lynx's eyes, and said:

  "You'll go far."

  My heart skipped a beat, thinking that perhaps he already knew all about me and that for him the farthest I could go might be death. In the confidential report that the publisher made to Zabala about his conversation with the colonel, he revealed that Polania Puyo knew the given and family names of the person who wrote each daily article. The publisher, in a gesture very typical of his nature, told him that they were written on his orders, and that on newspapers, as in barracks, orders were obeyed. In any event, the colonel advised the publisher to have us moderate the campaign in case some barbarian caveman wanted to impose justice in the name of his government. The publisher understood, and we all understood even what he left unsaid. What most surprised the publisher were the colonel's boasts that he knew the internal life of the paper as if he lived there. No one doubted that his secret agent was the censor, who swore on his dead mother that he was not. The only thing the colonel did not try to answer on his visit was our daily question. The publisher, who had a reputation for wisdom, advised us to believe everything we had been told, because the truth might be worse.