Living to Tell the Tale

  Outside the red-light district there were other houses, legal or clandestine, and all on good terms with the police. One was a courtyard of large flowering almond trees in a poor district, with a dilapidated shop and a bedroom with two cots for rent. The merchandise consisted of two anemic girls from the neighborhood who earned a peso at a time with confirmed drunkards. Alvaro Cepeda discovered the place by accident one afternoon when he was caught in an October downpour and took refuge in the shop. The owner invited him to have a beer, and she offered him two girls instead of one with a right to repeat until the weather cleared. Alvaro continued inviting his friends to drink ice-cold beer under the almond trees, not to go to bed with the girls but to teach them to read. He obtained scholarships for the most diligent to study at state schools. One of them had been a nurse at the Hospital de Caridad for years. He made the owner a present of the house, and until its natural extinction, the ramshackle kindergarten had an enticing name: "The house with the little girls who go to bed because they're hungry."

  For my first historic night in Barranquilla they chose the house of La Negra Eufemia that had an enormous cement courtyard for dancing surrounded by leafy tamarind trees, with cabanas for five pesos an hour and little tables and chairs painted bright colors and curlews wandering as they pleased. Eufemia in person, monumental and almost a hundred years old, greeted and selected clients at the entrance, behind an office desk whose only implement--inexplicable--was an enormous church nail. She chose the girls herself for their good manners and natural graces. Each one took whatever name she liked, and some preferred the ones that Alvaro Cepeda, with his passion for Mexican movies, gave them: Irma the Wicked, Susana the Perverse, Midnight Virgin.

  It seemed impossible to have a conversation with an ecstatic Caribbean orchestra playing the new mambos of Perez Prado at top volume, and a group that played boleros for forgetting bad memories, but we were all expert in shouting our conversations. The night's topic, brought up by German and Alvaro, had to do with the ingredients common to the novel and feature articles. They were enthusiastic about the one John Hersey had published about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but I preferred the direct reportorial testimony of Journal of the Plague Year, until the others explained to me that Daniel Defoe had been no more than five or six years old during the plague in London, which served as his model.

  By this path we came to the enigma of The Count of Monte Cristo, which the three of them had carried over from previous discussions as a riddle for novelists: how did Alexandre Dumas manage to have a sailor who was innocent, ignorant, poor, and imprisoned without cause, escape an impenetrable fortress transformed into the richest and most cultivated man of his time? The answer was that when Edmund Dantes entered the castle of If he already had constructed inside him the Abbot Faria, who transmitted to him in prison the essence of his knowledge and revealed what he needed to know for his new life: the place where a fantastic treasure was hidden, and the way to escape. That is: Dumas constructed two different characters and then switched their destinies. So that when Dantes escaped he was already one character inside another, and all that was left of himself was his good swimmer's body.

  It was clear to German that Dumas had made his character a sailor so that he could escape from the burlap sack and swim to shore when they threw him into the sea. Alvaro, erudite and no doubt more caustic, replied that this was no guarantee of anything because sixty percent of Christopher Columbus's crews did not know how to swim. Nothing pleased him as much as sprinkling those grains of pepper to rid the stew of any aftertaste of pedantry. Carried away by the game of literary enigmas, I began to drink without moderation the cane rum with lemon that the others were drinking in slow sips. The conclusion of all three was that the talent and handling of information by Dumas in that novel, and perhaps in all his work, was more a reporter's than a novelist's.

  In the end it was clear to me that my new friends read Quevedo and James Joyce with the same pleasure they derived from reading Arthur Conan Doyle. They had an inexhaustible sense of humor and were capable of spending whole nights singing boleros and vallenatos or reciting without hesitation the best poetry of the Golden Age. By different paths we came to agree that the summit of world poetry are the stanzas of Don Jorge Manrique on the death of his father. The night turned into a delicious entertainment that did away with any last prejudices that could have hindered my friendship with this band of learned maniacs. I felt so comfortable with them and the barbarous rum that I took off the straitjacket of my shyness. Susana the Perverse, who in March of that year had won the dance contest during Carnival, asked me to dance. They shooed the chickens and curlews away from the floor and stood in a circle around us to encourage us.

  We danced the series of Damaso Perez Prado's Mambo No. 5. With the breath I had left I took over the maracas on the tropical group's platform and for more than an hour I sang without stopping boleros of Daniel Santos, Agustin Lara, and Bienvenido Granda. As I sang I felt redeemed by a wind of liberation. I never knew if the three of them were proud or ashamed of me, but when I went back to the table they greeted me as one of their own.

  Alvaro had begun a topic that the others never discussed with him: the movies. For me it was a providential discovery, because I always had considered movies a subsidiary art nourished more by the theater than the novel. But Alvaro viewed film, in a sense, as I viewed music: as an art that was useful to all the others.

  At dawn, when he was both sleepy and drunk, Alvaro drove the car crammed with recent books and literary supplements of the New York Times as if he were a master cab driver. We dropped German and Alfonso at their houses, and Alvaro insisted on taking me to his to see his library, which covered three walls, floor to ceiling, of his bedroom. He made a complete turn, pointing at them with his index finger, and said:

  "These are the only writers in the world who know how to write."

  I was in a state of excitement that made me forget what yesterday had been hunger and fatigue. The alcohol was still alive inside me like a state of grace. Alvaro showed me his favorite books, in Spanish and English, and he spoke of each one with his rusty voice, his disheveled hair, his eyes more demented than ever. He spoke of Azorin and Saroyan--two weaknesses of his--and of others whose public and private lives he knew down to their underwear. It was the first time I heard the name of Virginia Woolf, whom he called Old Lady Woolf, like Old Man Faulkner. My amazement inspired him to the point of delirium. He seized the pile of books he had shown me as his favorites and placed them in my hands.

  "Don't be an asshole," he said, "take them all, and when you finish reading them we'll come get them no matter where you are."

  For me they were an inconceivable treasure that I did not dare put at risk when I did not have even a miserable hole where I could keep them. At last he resigned himself to giving me the Spanish version of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, with the unappealable prediction that I would learn it by heart.

  Day was breaking. I wanted to go back to Cartagena on the first bus, but Alvaro insisted that I sleep in the other twin bed.

  "What the hell!" he said with his last bit of strength. "Come live here and tomorrow we'll find you a fabulous job."

  I lay down in my clothes on the bed, and only then did I feel in my body the immense weight of being alive. He did the same and we slept until eleven in the morning, when his mother, the adored and feared Sara Samudio, knocked on the door with a clenched fist, believing that the only child of her life was dead.

  "Don't pay attention to her, Maestro," Alvaro said to me from the depths of sleep. "Every morning she says the same thing, and the serious part is that one day it'll be true."

  I went back to Cartagena with the air of someone who had discovered the world. Then the recitations after meals in the house of the Franco Munera family were not poems of the Golden Age and Neruda's Twenty Love Poems, but paragraphs from Mrs. Dalloway and the ravings of its heartbreaking character, Septimus Warren Smith. I turned into another person
, restless and difficult, to the point where Hector and Maestro Zabala thought I had become a conscious imitator of Alvaro Cepeda. Gustavo Ibarra, with his compassionate vision of the Caribbean heart, was amused by my tale of the night in Barranquilla, while he gave me more and more rational spoonfuls of Greek poets, with the express and never-explained exception of Euripides. He introduced me to Melville: the literary feat of Moby-Dick, the magnificent sermon about Jonah for whalers weathered on all the oceans of the world under the immense dome constructed with the ribs of whales. He lent me Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, which marked me for life. Together we attempted a theory of the fatality of nostalgia in the wanderings of Ulysses Odysseus, where we became lost and never found our way out. Half a century later I discovered it resolved in a masterful text by Milan Kundera.

  During this same period I had my sole encounter with the great poet Luis Carlos Lopez, better known as El Tuerto, or One-eye, who had invented a comfortable way of being dead without dying, and buried without a funeral, and above all without orations. He lived in the historic center in a historic house on the historic Calle del Tablon, where he was born and lived without disturbing anyone. He saw a very few old friends, while his reputation for being a great poet continued to grow in his lifetime as only posthumous glory grows.

  They called him one-eyed even though he was not, because in reality he was only cross-eyed, but in an unusual way that was very difficult to characterize. His brother, Domingo Lopez Escauriaza, the publisher of El Universal, always had the same answer for those who asked about him:

  "He's there."

  It seemed an evasion, but it was the only truth: he was there. More alive than anyone else, but also with the advantage of being alive without anyone finding out too much, aware of everything, and determined to walk to his own funeral. People spoke of him as if he were a historical relic, in particular those who had not read him. In fact, since my arrival in Cartagena I had not tried to see him, out of respect for his privileges as an invisible man. At the time he was sixty-eight years old, and no one had any doubt that he was a great poet for the ages, though there were not many of us who knew who he was or why, and it was not easy to believe because of the rare quality of his work.

  Zabala, Rojas Herazo, Gustavo Ibarra: we all knew poems of his by heart and always quoted them without thinking, in a spontaneous and knowledgeable way, to illuminate our conversations. He was not unsociable but shy. Even today I do not remember having seen a portrait of him, if there was one, only some quick caricatures that were published instead. I believe that because we did not see him we had forgotten he was still alive, and one night when I was finishing my piece for the day, I heard a stifled exclamation from Zabala:

  "Damn, it's El Tuerto!"

  I looked up from the typewriter and saw the strangest man I would ever see. Much shorter than we had imagined, with hair so white it looked blue and so unruly it looked borrowed. His left eye was not missing, but as his nickname indicated, it was crossed.* He dressed as if he were at home, in dark drill trousers and a striped shirt, his right hand, at the height of his shoulder, holding a silver holder with a lit cigarette that he did not smoke and whose ash fell without tapping when it could no longer hold on by itself.

  He walked through to his brother's office and came out two hours later, when only Zabala and I were left in the newsroom, waiting to greet him. He died two years later, and the upheaval it caused among the faithful seemed to be not because he had died but because he had been resuscitated. On view in his coffin he did not appear as dead as when he was alive.

  During the same period the Spanish writer Damaso Alonso and his wife, the novelist Eulalia Galvarriato, gave two lectures in the main auditorium of the university. Maestro Zabala, who did not like to disturb anyone's life, for once overcame his circumspection and requested a meeting. Gustavo Ibarra, Hector Rojas Herazo, and I accompanied him, and there was an immediate chemistry with them. We stayed some four hours in a private meeting room in the Hotel del Caribe, exchanging impressions of their first trip to Latin America and our dreams as new writers. Hector brought them a book of poems, and I had a photocopy of a story published in El Espectador. What interested both of us most was the frankness of their reservations, because they used them as oblique confirmations of their praise.

  In October I found a message from Gonzalo Mallarino at El Universal saying that he was waiting for me, with the poet Alvaro Mutis, in Villa Tulipan, an unforgettable pension in the beach resort of Bocagrande, a few meters from the place where Charles Lindbergh had landed some twenty years earlier. Gonzalo, my accomplice in private recitations at the university, was already a practicing attorney, and in his capacity as head of public relations for LANSA, a national airline founded by its own pilots, Mutis had invited him so to see the ocean.

  Poems by Mutis and stories of mine had coincided at least once in "Fin de Semana," and it was enough for us to see each other to begin a conversation that is still going on, in countless places in the world, after more than half a century. First our children and then our grandchildren have often asked us what we talk about with such fierce passion, and we tell them the truth: we always talk about the same thing.

  My miraculous friendships with adults in arts and letters gave me the courage to survive those years, which I still remember as the most uncertain of my life. On July 10 I had published the last "Period. New Paragraph" in El Universal, after three arduous months in which I could not overcome the obstacles of being a novice, and I preferred to stop writing it, the sole merit being that I would escape in time. I took refuge in the impunity of commentaries on the editorial page, unsigned except when they needed a personal touch. I kept this up through sheer routine until September 1950, with a pompous note on Edgar Allan Poe, its sole merit being that it was the worst of them.

  During all that year I had persisted in asking Maestro Zabala to teach me the secrets of writing feature articles. He never decided to, given his mysterious nature, but he left me troubled by the enigma of a twelve-year-old girl, buried in the Convent of Santa Clara, whose hair grew after her death, more than twenty meters in two centuries. I never imagined I would return to this subject forty years later and recount it in a romantic novel with sinister implications. But these were not my best days for thinking. I had fits of rage for any reason at all, and would disappear from work with no explanations until Maestro Zabala sent someone to calm me down. I passed the final exams of the second year of law by a stroke of luck, with only two subjects to make up, and I was able to matriculate for the third year, but a rumor circulated that I had achieved this through political pressure from the paper. The publisher had to intervene when I was stopped coming out of the movies carrying a false record of military service, and I was on the list to be sent on punitive missions to enforce public order.

  In my political obfuscation at the time, I did not even know that martial law had been reimposed in the country because of the increase in lawlessness. Press censorship was tightened a few more turns. The atmosphere rarefied as it did in the worst times, and a political police reinforced with common criminals sowed panic in the countryside. The violence obliged Liberals to abandon lands and homes. Their possible candidate, Dario Echandia, the teacher of teachers of civil law, a born skeptic and habitual reader of Greek and Latin authors, pronounced in favor of a Liberal abstention at the polls. The way was open for the election of Laureano Gomez, who seemed to direct the government from New York with invisible strings.

  I did not have a clear awareness then that these misfortunes were not only the infamies of the Goths but symptoms of evil changes in our lives, until one of many nights at La Cueva, when it occurred to me to boast about my freedom to do whatever I wished. Maestro Zabala held in midair the spoonful of soup he was about to eat, looking at me over the arch of his eyeglasses, and stopped me cold:

  "Just tell me one thing, Gabriel: in the midst of all the damn fool things you do, have you been able to realize that this country is coming
to an end?"

  The question hit its mark. I was dead drunk when I lay down at dawn to sleep on a bench on the Paseo de los Martires, and a biblical downpour left me soaked to the skin. I spent two weeks in the hospital with a pneumonia resistant to the first known antibiotics, which had a bad reputation for causing side effects as terrifying as premature impotence. I was more skeletal and pale than I was by nature, and my parents called me back to Sucre to help me recuperate from an excess of work--as they said in their letter. El Universal went even further, with a farewell editorial that sanctified me as a journalist and writer of masterful talents, and another that cited me as the author of a novel that never existed and with a title that was not mine: We've Already Cut the Hay. Even stranger at a time when I had no intention of backsliding into fiction. The truth is that this title, so alien to me, was invented by Hector Rojas Herazo while he was typing, as one more contribution from Cesar Guerra Valdes, an imaginary writer of the purest Latin American stock created by him to enrich our polemics. Hector had published news of his arrival in Cartagena in El Universal, and I had written him a greeting in "Period. New Paragraph" in the hope of shaking the dust from the dormant awareness of an authentic continental narrative. In any case, the imaginary novel with the beautiful title invented by Hector was reviewed years later in an essay on my books, I do not know where or why, as a fundamental work of the new literature.