Living to Tell the Tale

  After I became involved in the war against censorship, I had nothing to do with the university or with writing stories. It was just as well that most of the teachers did not take attendance, which encouraged missing class. Besides, the liberal teachers who knew about my evasions of censorship suffered more than I did as they looked for a way to help me on examinations. Today, trying to recount those days, I do not find them in my recollection, and I have come to believe more in forgetting than in memory.

  My parents rested easy after I let them know that at the paper I earned enough to live on. It was not true. The monthly salary for an apprentice did not last a week. Before three months had passed I left the hotel with an unpayable debt that the landlady later traded for a note on the society page about her granddaughter's fifteenth birthday. But she agreed to the exchange only once.

  The most crowded and coolest bedroom in the city continued to be the Paseo de los Martires, even with the curfew. I would stay there and doze sitting up when the late-night tertulias had ended. At other times I slept in the newspaper storeroom on rolls of paper, or appeared with my circus hammock under my arm in the rooms of other judicious students and stayed for as long as they could stand my nightmares and my bad habit of talking in my sleep. In this way I survived by luck and chance, eating whatever there happened to be and sleeping wherever God willed, until the humanitarian tribe of the Franco Munera family proposed giving me two meals a day for a compassionate price. The father of the tribe--Bolivar Franco--was a historic primary-school teacher, with a joyful, fanatical family of artists and writers who obliged me to eat more than I had paid them for so my brains would not dry up. Often I had no money, but they took consolation in recitations after the meal. I paid frequent installments in that inspiring transaction with the stanzas of variable long and short lines written by Don Jorge Manrique on the death of his father, and the Gypsy Ballads of Garcia Lorca.

  The open-air brothels on the broad beaches of Tesca, far from the disturbing silence behind the wall, were more hospitable than the tourist hotels along the shore. Half a dozen of us, students at the university, settled down at El Cisne in the early evening to prepare for final exams under the blinding lights of the courtyard for dancing. The ocean breeze and the bellow of the ships at dawn consoled us for the blare of Caribbean brass and the provocations of the girls who danced without panties in very wide skirts so that the ocean breeze would blow them up above their waists. From time to time some little bird nostalgic for her papa would invite us to sleep with the little bit of love she had left at dawn. One of them, whose name and measurements I remember very well, let herself be seduced by the fantasies I recounted while I was asleep. Thanks to her I passed Roman law without any trickery, and escaped several roundups when the police prohibited sleeping in the parks. We got along like a serviceable married couple, not only in bed but in domestic chores, which I did for her at dawn so that she could sleep a few hours longer.

  By then I was beginning to adjust very well to editorial work, which I always considered more a form of literature than of journalism. Bogota was a nightmare of the past, two hundred leagues away and more than two thousand meters above sea level, about which I remembered only the stench of the ashes on April 9. I still had the fever of arts and letters, above all in midnight tertulias, but I was beginning to lose my enthusiasm for being a writer. This was so true that I did not write another story after the three published in El Espectador until Eduardo Zalamea found me early in July and asked me, with the mediation of Maestro Zabala, to send him another one for his paper after six months of silence. Because the request came from the person it came from, I picked up in haphazard fashion ideas that had been mislaid in my rough drafts and wrote "Death's Other Rib," which was a little more of the same thing. I remember very well that I had no plot prepared and invented it as I was writing. It was published on July 25, 1948, in the "Fin de Semana" supplement, just as the others had been, and I wrote no more stories until the following year, when my life was no longer the same. I needed only to renounce the few law classes I still attended on occasion, but they were my last alibi for maintaining my parents' dream.

  I did not suspect at the time that I would soon be a better student than ever in the library of Gustavo Ibarra Merlano, a new friend introduced to me with great enthusiasm by Zabala and Rojas Herazo. He had just returned from Bogota with a degree from Normal Superior, and without delay he joined the tertulias at El Universal and the discussions at dawn on the Paseo de los Martires. Between the volcanic loquacity of Hector and the creative skepticism of Zabala, Gustavo brought me the systematic rigor that my improvised and scattered ideas, and the frivolity of my heart, were in real need of. And all that with great tenderness and an iron character.

  The next day he invited me to his parents' house on the Marbella beach, with the immense sea as a backyard, and a new, well-ordered library along a twelve-meter wall, where only the books you had to read in order to live without regrets were kept. He had editions of the Greek, Latin, and Spanish classics in such good condition they did not seem to have been read, but scribbled in the margins were learned notes, some of them in Latin. Gustavo also said them aloud, and when he did he blushed to the roots of his hair and tried to get around them with a corrosive humor. A friend had told me before I met him: "The guy's a priest." I soon understood why this was easy to believe, though after I knew him well it was almost impossible to believe he was not.

  That first time we talked without stopping until the small hours, and I learned that his readings were long and varied but sustained by a thorough knowledge of the Catholic intellectuals of the day, whom I had never heard of. He knew everything that one should know about poetry, in particular the Greek and Latin classics, which he read in their original versions. He had well-informed opinions of our mutual friends and gave me valuable information that made me love them even more. He also confirmed the importance of my meeting the three journalists from Barranquilla--Cepeda, Vargas, and Fuenmayor--about whom Rojas Herazo and Maestro Zabala had spoken so often. I found it remarkable that in addition to having so many intellectual and civic virtues, he swam like an Olympic champion and had a body trained to be one. What concerned him most about me was my dangerous contempt for the Greek and Latin classics, which seemed boring and useless to me, except for the Odyssey, which I had read and reread in bits and pieces several times at the liceo. And so before we said goodbye, he chose a leather-bound book from the library and handed it to me with a certain solemnity. "You may become a good writer," he said, "but you'll never become very good if you don't have a good knowledge of the Greek classics." The book was the complete works of Sophocles. From that moment on Gustavo was one of the decisive beings in my life, for Oedipus Rex revealed itself to me on first reading as the perfect work.

  It was a historic night because I had discovered Gustavo Ibarra and Sophocles at the same time, and because hours later I could have died an awful death in the room of my secret girlfriend at El Cisne. I remember as if it had happened yesterday when a former lover of hers, whom she had thought dead for over a year, kicked down the door of her room, shouting a wild man's insults. I recognized him at once as a fellow student at the primary school in Aracataca who had come back in a rage to take possession of his bed. We had not seen each other since then, and he had the good taste to pretend not to notice when he recognized me, naked and muddied with terror, in the bed.

  That year I also met Ramiro and Oscar de la Espriella, endless conversationalists, above all in houses prohibited by Christian morality. They both lived with their parents in Turbaco, an hour from Cartagena, and they showed up almost every day at the tertulias of writers and artists at the Americana ice cream parlor. Ramiro, a graduate of the faculty of law in Bogota, was very close to the group at El Universal, where he published an occasional column. His father was a formidable lawyer and a freewheeling Liberal, and his mother was charming and outspoken. They both had the admirable custom of conversing with young people. In our long talks u
nder the leafy ash trees of Turbaco, they offered invaluable information about the War of a Thousand Days, the literary source that had been extinguished for me with the death of my grandfather. To her I owe the view that seems most reliable to me, and the one I still have, of General Rafael Uribe Uribe, from his respectable elegance to the caliber of his wrists.

  The best testimony to what Ramiro and I were like in those days was created in oils on canvas by the painter Cecilia Porras, who felt right at home at men's wild parties, in defiance of the prudery of her social milieu. It was a portrait of the two of us sitting at the table in the cafe where we would see her and other friends twice a day. When Ramiro and I were about to go our separate ways, we had an irreconcilable argument about who owned the painting. Cecilia resolved it with the Solomonic formula of cutting the canvas in half with pruning shears and giving each of us our part. Years later mine was left rolled up in the closet of an apartment in Caracas, and I never could get it back.

  In contrast to the rest of the country, official violence had not ravaged Cartagena until the beginning of that year, when our friend Carlos Aleman was elected deputy to the Departmental Assembly by the very distinguished district of Mompox. He was an attorney fresh out of the oven, and very good-natured, but the devil played a bad joke on him in the opening session when the two rival parties opened fire on each other and a stray bullet scorched his shoulder pad. Aleman must have thought, and with reason, that a legislative power as useless as ours did not deserve the sacrifice of a life, and he preferred to spend his government salary in advance in the good company of his friends.

  Oscar de la Espriella, who was a sterling carouser, agreed with William Faulkner that a brothel is the best residence for a writer, because the mornings are quiet, there is a party every night, and you are on good terms with the police. Deputy Aleman took this in a literal way and made himself our full-time host. One night, however, I repented of having believed in Faulkner's illusions when an old boyfriend of Mary Reyes, the madam of the house, knocked down the door to take away their son, a child of five, who lived with her. Her current boyfriend, who had been a police officer, came out of the bedroom in his shorts to defend the honor and goods of the house with his regulation revolver, and the other man greeted him with a burst of gunfire that resounded in the dance hall like a shot from a cannon. The frightened sergeant hid in his room. When I came out of mine, half dressed, the transient tenants were contemplating the boy from their rooms as he urinated at the end of the hallway, while his papa smoothed his hair with his left hand and held the still-smoking revolver in his right. All you could hear in the house were Mary's insults as she reproached the sergeant for not having any balls.

  During this same time a gigantic man came into the offices of El Universal unannounced, removed his shirt with a great sense of theater, and walked around the newsroom to surprise us with the sight of his back and arms mottled with scars that seemed to be of cement. Moved by the astonishment he had inspired in us, he explained the devastation of his body in a thundering voice:

  "Lions' claws!"

  It was Emilio Razzore, who had just arrived in Cartagena to prepare for the performance season of his famous family circus, one of the great ones in the world. It had left Havana the week before on the steamship Euskera, of Spanish registry, and it was expected the following Saturday. Razzore boasted of having been in the circus since before he was born, and you did not need to see him perform to know he was a wild-animal tamer. He called the beasts by their first names as if they were members of his family, and they responded with behavior that was affectionate and brutal at the same time. He would go unarmed into the cages of tigers and lions and feed them out of his hand. His pet bear had given him a loving hug that kept him in the hospital for one entire spring. The great attraction, however, was not Razzore or the fire-eater, but the man who screwed off his head and walked around the ring holding it under his arm. The least forgettable thing about Emilio Razzore was his indomitable nature. After listening to him, fascinated, for many long hours, I published an editorial in El Universal in which I dared to write that he was "the most tremendously human man I have ever met." At the age of twenty-one there had not been that many, but I believe the phrase is still valid. We ate at La Cueva with the people from the paper, and he was cherished there, too, with his tales of wild animals humanized by love. On one of those nights, after thinking about it a good deal, I dared to ask him to take me into his circus, even if it was to wash out the cages when the tigers were not inside. He did not say anything but gave me his hand in silence. I understood this as a secret circus gesture, and I considered it done. The only person I told was Salvador Mesa Nicholls, a poet from Antioquia with a mad love for the circus who had just come to Cartagena as a local partner of the Razzores. He too had gone away with a circus when he was my age, and he warned me that those who see clowns cry for the first time want to go away with them but regret it the next day. Yet he not only approved of my decision but convinced the tamer, on the condition we keep it a complete secret so that it would not become news too early. Waiting for the circus, which until then had been exciting, now became irresistible.

  The Euskera did not arrive on the anticipated date and it had been impossible to communicate with her. After a week we established from the newspaper offices a system of ham radio operators to track weather conditions in the Caribbean, but we could not prevent the beginning of speculation in the press and on the radio about the possibility of horrifying news. Mesa Nicholls and I spent those intense days with Emilio Razzore in his hotel room, not eating or sleeping. We saw him collapse, diminishing in volume and size during the interminable wait, until all our hearts confirmed that the Euskera would never arrive anywhere, and there would be no report on what had happened to her. The animal tamer spent another day alone in his room, and the next day he visited me at the paper to say that a hundred years of daily struggle could not disappear in a single day. And so he was going to Miami with not even a nail and without a family to rebuild piece by piece, and starting with nothing, the shipwrecked circus. I was so struck by his determination in spite of the tragedy that I accompanied him to Barranquilla to see him off on the plane to Florida. Before he boarded he thanked me for my decision to join his circus, and he promised he would send for me as soon as he had something concrete. He said goodbye with so heartbreaking an embrace that I understood with my soul the love his lions had for him. I never heard from him again.

  The Miami plane took off at ten in the morning on the same day that my editorial on Razzore appeared: September 16, 1948. I was preparing to return to Cartagena that same afternoon when it occurred to me to stop by El Nacional, an evening paper where German Vargas and Alvaro Cepeda, the friends of my friends in Cartagena, were working. The newsroom was in a decayed building in the old city, a long, empty room divided by a wooden railing. At the back of the room a young blond man in shirtsleeves was typing on a machine whose keys exploded like bombs in the deserted room. I approached almost on tiptoe, intimidated by the mournful creaking of the floor, and I waited at the railing until he turned to look at me, and in a curt way, in the harmonious voice of a professional announcer, he said:

  "What is it?"

  He had short hair, strong cheekbones, and clear, intense eyes that seemed annoyed by the interruption. I answered the best I could, letter by letter:

  "I'm Garcia Marquez."

  Only when I heard my own name spoken with so much conviction did I realize that German Vargas might not know who I was, though in Cartagena they had said they talked about me a good deal with their friends in Barranquilla after they read my first story. El Nacional had published an enthusiastic note by German Vargas, who was not easy to fool when it came to new literature. But the enthusiasm with which he received me confirmed that he knew very well who I was, and his affection was more real than I had been told. A few hours later I met Alfonso Fuenmayor and Alvaro Cepeda in the Libreria Mundo, and we had drinks at the Cafe Colombia. Don Ramon Vinyes, the
learned Catalan whom I longed to meet and was terrified of meeting, had not come to the six o'clock tertulia that afternoon. When we left the Cafe Colombia, with five drinks under our belts, we had been friends for years.

  It was a long night of innocence. Alvaro, an inspired driver who became more certain and prudent the more he drank, followed the itinerary for memorable occasions. In Los Almendros, an open-air tavern under the flowering trees where they only admitted fans of the Deportivo Junior team, several patrons were involved in an argument that was about to come to blows. I tried to calm them down until Alfonso advised me not to intervene because in that place filled with doctors of soccer, things did not go well for pacifists. And so I spent the night in a city that was not the one it had always been for me, or the one of my parents in their early years, or the one of poverty-stricken times with my mother, or the one of Colegio San Jose, but my first time in Barranquilla as an adult, in the paradise of its brothels.

  The red-light district was four blocks of metallic music that made the earth tremble, but they also had domestic corners that came very close to charity. There were family brothels whose owners, with their wives and children, tended to their veteran clients according to the norms of Don Manuel Antonio Carreno's Christian morality and urbanity. Some served as guarantors so that apprentices would go to bed on credit with known clients. Martina Alvarado, the oldest brothel, had a furtive door and humanitarian rates for repentant clerics. There were no hidden charges, no doctored accounts, no venereal surprises. The last French madams from the First World War, ailing and melancholy, sat in the doors of their houses under the stigma of red lightbulbs, waiting for a third generation who still believed in their aphrodisiac condoms. There were houses with cooled rooms for clandestine meetings of conspirators and sanctuaries for mayors fleeing their wives.

  El Gato Negro, with a courtyard for dancing under a bower of crape myrtle, had been the paradise of the merchant fleet ever since its purchase by a bleached-blond Guajiran who sang in English and sold her hallucinogenic pomades for ladies and gentlemen under the table. On a historic night in the house's annals, Alvaro Cepeda and Quique Scopell could not endure the racism of a dozen Norwegian sailors who stood in line outside the room of the only black girl while sixteen white girls sat snoring in the courtyard, and they challenged the sailors to a fight. By dint of their fists the two forced the twelve to flee, with the help of the white girls who were happy when they woke and finished the job by hitting the sailors with their chairs. In the end, in a lunatic act of indemnification, they crowned the naked black girl queen of Norway.