Living to Tell the Tale

  My other addiction was no less persistent. One afternoon a maid from the house next door came in, and after talking to everyone she went to the terrace and with great respect asked permission to speak with me. I did not stop reading until she asked:

  "Do you remember Matilde?"

  I did not remember, but she did not believe me.

  "Don't play the fool, Senor Gabito," she said with deliberate emphasis. "Ni-gro-man-ta."

  And with reason: Nigromanta was now a free woman, with a child by the dead policeman, and she lived alone in the same house as her mother and other members of the family, but in a bedroom that was set apart, with its own door out to the back end of the cemetery. I went to see her, and our reencounter went on for more than a month. Each time I delayed my return to Cartagena and wanted to stay in Sucre forever. Until one dawn when I was caught by surprise in her house by a storm with thunder and lightning like the one on the night of Russian roulette. I tried to stay under the eaves, but when I no longer could I plunged into the middle of the street with the water up to my knees. It was my good luck that my mother was alone in the kitchen and took me to my bedroom along the garden paths so that Papa would not hear. As soon as she helped me take off my dripping wet shirt, she held it at arm's length with the tips of her thumb and index finger and tossed it into the corner with a shudder of disgust.

  "You were with that woman," she said.

  I turned to stone.

  "How do you know that?"

  "Because it's the same odor as the other time," she said, her face impassive. "It's just as well her man is dead."

  I was surprised by this lack of compassion for the first time in her life. She must have noticed, because she drove the point home without thinking about it.

  "It's the only death that made me glad when I heard about it."

  I asked in perplexity:

  "How did you know who she is?"

  "Oh, son," she said with a sigh, "God tells me everything about all of you."

  Then she helped me take off my dripping trousers and tossed them in the corner with the rest of the clothes. "All of you are going to be just like your papa," she said without warning, heaving a deep sigh, while she dried my back with a burlap towel. And she finished with all her heart:

  "God willing, you'll also be husbands as good as he is."

  The dramatic treatments to which my mother subjected me must have had the desired effect of forestalling a recurrence of pneumonia. Until I realized that she herself complicated them in order to keep me from returning to the thunder-and-lightning bed of Nigromanta, whom I never saw again.

  I returned to Cartagena restored and happy, with the news that I was writing La casa, and I talked about it as if it were an accomplished fact after I had just begun the first chapter. Zabala and Hector greeted me like the prodigal son. At the university, my good teachers seemed resigned to accepting me as I was. At the same time I continued to write very occasional pieces that were paid by the job at El Universal. My career as a short-story writer continued with the little I managed to write, almost to please Maestro Zabala: "Dialogue of the Mirror" and "Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers," published by El Espectador. Although in both of them there was an evident lightening of the primary rhetoric of the first four stories, I still was not out of the swamp.

  By this time Cartagena was infected by the political tension in the rest of the country, which should have been considered as an omen that something serious was going to happen. At the end of the year the Liberals declared their abstention from the entire election because of the savagery of the political persecution, but they did not renounce their underground plans to overthrow the government. The violence grew worse in the countryside and people fled to the cities, but censorship obliged the press to write about this in an oblique manner. It was common knowledge, however, that fugitive Liberals had organized guerrilla bands in different parts of the country. In the eastern Llanos--an immense ocean of green pastureland that occupies more than a quarter of the national territory--they had become legendary. Their general commander, Guadalupe Salcedo, was already viewed as a mythic figure, even by the army, and his photographs were distributed in secret and copied by the hundreds, and candles were lit to them on altars.

  The De la Espriella family appeared to know more than they said, and in their walled enclosure they spoke with complete naturalness about an imminent coup against the Conservative regime. I did not know the details, but Maestro Zabala had warned me that as soon as I noticed any disturbance in the street I should go straight to the newspaper. You could touch the tension with your hands when I walked into the Americana ice cream parlor at three in the afternoon to keep an appointment. I sat down to read at a back table as someone approached, and one of my old classmates, with whom I had never talked about politics, said as he passed by without looking at me:

  "Get to the paper, the thing's about to begin."

  I did just the opposite: I wanted to know how things turned out right in the center of the city and not behind the closed doors of the newsroom. Minutes later a press officer in the Gobernacion, whom I knew well, sat down at my table, and I did not think he had been ordered to neutralize me. I talked to him for half an hour in the purest state of innocence, and when he stood to leave I discovered that the enormous room in the ice cream parlor had emptied out without my realizing it. He followed my glance and confirmed the hour: ten past one.

  "Don't worry," he said with controlled relief. "Nothing happened."

  In fact, the most important group of Liberal leaders, desperate because of the official violence, had come to an agreement with democratic military men of the highest rank to end the slaughter that had been unleashed throughout the country by the Conservative regime, which was prepared to remain in power at any price. Most of them had participated in the steps taken on April 9 to achieve peace through an agreement with President Ospina Perez, and less than twenty months later they realized too late that they had been victims of a colossal deception. The frustrated action that day had been authorized by the president of the Liberal leadership, Carlos Lleras Restrepo, through Plinio Mendoza Neira, who had excellent relations within the Armed Forces since he had been minister of war under the Liberal government. The action coordinated by Mendoza Neira, with the secret collaboration of prominent party members all over the country, was supposed to begin at dawn that day with the bombing of the Palacio Presidencial by planes from the air force. The movement was supported by the naval bases at Cartagena and Apiay, by most of the military garrisons in the country, and by trade unions determined to seize power for a civilian government of national reconciliation.

  Only after the failure was it learned that two days before the anticipated date of the action, the former president Eduardo Santos had brought together the high Liberal officials and the leaders of the coup for a final review of the project in his house in Bogota. In the midst of the debate, someone asked the ritual question:

  "Will there be bloodshed?"

  No one was ingenuous enough or cynical enough to say no. Other leaders explained that maximum measures had been taken to avoid it, but no magical formulas existed for preventing the unforeseen. Frightened by the extent of their own conspiracy, the Liberal leadership issued the counterorder without discussion. Many of those who were involved but did not receive the order in time were arrested or killed during the attempt. Others advised Mendoza to continue alone until the power takeover, and he did not for reasons more ethical than political, but he did not have the time or the means to warn all those involved. He managed to take refuge in the embassy of Venezuela, and he lived in exile for four years in Caracas, safe from a court-martial that sentenced him in absentia to twenty-five years in prison for sedition. Fifty-two years later my hand does not tremble when I write--without his authorization--that he repented for the rest of his life, in his exile in Caracas, because of the devastating balance left by Conservatism in power: no less than three hundred thousand dead.

  For me as w
ell, in a certain sense, this was a crucial moment. In less than two months I had failed the third year at the faculty of law and ended my commitment to El Universal, for I did not see my future in either one. My pretext was to free my time for the novel I had just begun, though in the depths of my soul I knew it was neither true nor a lie; instead, the project had revealed itself to me without warning as a rhetorical formula, with very little of the good that I had known how to use from Faulkner and all the bad of my inexperience. I soon learned that telling stories parallel to the ones you are writing--without revealing their essence--is a valuable part of the conception and the writing. This, however, was not the case at the time, but for lack of something to show I had invented a spoken novel to entertain my listeners and deceive myself.

  That awareness obliged me to rethink, from beginning to end, the project that never had more than forty pages written in fits and starts and yet was cited in magazines and newspapers--and by me as well--and imaginative readers even published some very smart advance reviews. At bottom, the reason for this custom of recounting parallel projects deserves not reproaches but compassion: the terror of writing can be as intolerable as the terror of not writing. In my case, moreover, I am convinced that telling the real story brings bad luck. It comforts me, however, that at times the oral account might be better than the written one, and without realizing it we may be inventing a new genre that literature needs now: the fiction of fiction.

  The real truth is that I did not know how to go on living. My convalescence in Sucre allowed me to realize that I did not know where I was going in life, but it gave me no clues as to the right direction or any new argument for convincing my parents that they would not die if I took the liberty of deciding that for myself. So I went to Barranquilla with two hundred pesos from her household funds that my mother had given me before I returned to Cartagena.

  On December 15, 1949, I walked into the Libreria Mundo at five in the afternoon to wait for the friends I had not seen since our night in May when I had left with the unforgettable Senor Razzore. I had only a small beach bag with another change of clothing, some books, and the leather briefcase with my rough drafts. Minutes after I arrived all of them came into the bookstore, one behind the other. It was a noisy welcome, without Alvaro Cepeda, who was still in New York. When the group was complete we moved on to drinks, which no longer were in the Cafe Colombia next to the bookstore but in a new one with closer friends across the street: Cafe Japy.

  I had no destination, not that night and not ever in my life. The strange thing is that I never thought my destination could be Barranquilla, and if I went there it was only to talk about literature and to thank them in person for the shipment of books they had sent me in Sucre. We had more than enough of the first but nothing of the second, though I tried many times, because the group had a sacramental terror of the custom of giving or receiving thanks among ourselves.

  That night German Vargas improvised a meal for twelve people, who ran the gamut from journalists, painters, and notaries to the governor of the department, a typical Barranquillan Conservative with his own way of perceiving and governing. Most of them left after midnight, and the rest drifted away until only Alfonso, German, and I were left, along with the governor, more or less in the right mind we tended to be in at the dawns of our adolescence.

  In that night's long conversations I received a surprising lesson from him on the nature of those who governed the city during the blood-soaked years. He calculated that in all the destruction of that barbarous policy, the most devastating aspect was the impressive number of refugees without housing or food in the cities.

  "At this rate," he concluded, "my party, with the help of weapons, will have no adversary in the next elections and will be in absolute control of power."

  The only exception was Barranquilla, in accordance with a culture of political coexistence that the local Conservatives themselves took part in and that had made the city a refuge of peace in the eye of the hurricane. I tried to make an ethical observation, but he stopped me cold with a gesture of his hand.

  "Excuse me," he said, "but this does not mean we are on the margins of national life. On the contrary: because of our peacefulness, the social drama of the country has come tiptoeing in through the back door, and now we have it here inside."

  Then I learned that there were some five thousand refugees who had come from the interior in the worst misery, and no one knew how to rehabilitate them or where to hide them so that the problem would not become public. For the first time in the history of the city there were military patrols guarding critical locations, and everyone saw them but the government denied it and the censorship kept it from being denounced in the press.

  At dawn, after almost dragging the distinguished governor home, we went to the Chop Suey, the breakfast spot for great all-nighters. At the kiosk on the corner Alfonso bought three copies of El Heraldo, whose editorial page had a note signed by Puck, his pseudonym for the column that appeared every other day. It was only a greeting for me, but German kidded him because the note said I was there on an informal vacation.

  "The best thing would have been to say that he's going to live here so you wouldn't have to write a greeting and then a farewell," joked German. "Less expensive for a paper as cheap as El Heraldo."

  Serious now, Alfonso thought his editorial section could use another columnist. But German was indomitable in the light of the dawn.

  "He'll be a fifth columnist because you already have four."

  Neither one consulted with me as I wanted them to so that I could say yes. The subject was not spoken of again. It was not really necessary, because that night Alfonso told me he had spoken to the management of the paper and they liked the idea of a new columnist, as long as he was good but without too many pretensions. In any case, they could not resolve anything until after the New Year holiday. And so I stayed with the pretext of the job, even though they might tell me no in February.

  7

  THAT WAS HOW my first piece was published on the editorial page of El Heraldo in Barranquilla on January 5, 1950. I did not want to sign my name so that I would have the cure ready in case things did not work out, which is what had happened at El Universal. I did not have to think twice about the pseudonym: Septimus, taken from Septimus Warren Smith, Virginia Woolf's deluded character in Mrs. Dalloway. The title of the column--"La Jirafa"--was the secret nickname I alone knew for my only partner at the dances in Sucre.

  It seemed to me that the January winds blew harder than ever that year, and it was almost impossible to walk into them on the streets they castigated until dawn. The topic of conversation when you woke was the devastation caused by the mad winds during the night, when they carried away dreams and henhouses and turned sheets of zinc from the roofs into flying guillotines.

  Today I think those wild winds swept away the remains of a sterile past and opened the doors to a new life for me. My relationship with the group was no longer based only on pleasure; it became a professional partnership. At first we commented on the subjects we planned to write about or exchanged observations that were not at all doctoral though they were not to be forgotten. The definitive one for me came one morning when I went into the Japy as German Vargas was finishing his silent reading of "La Jirafa," cut out of that day's paper. The others in the group sat around the table waiting for his verdict with a kind of reverential terror that made the smoke in the room even denser. When he finished, without even looking at me, German ripped it into pieces, did not say a single word, and mixed the scraps of paper into the trash of cigarette butts and burned matches in the ashtray. No one said anything, the mood at the table did not change, and the episode was never commented on. But the lesson is still useful to me when out of laziness or haste I am assaulted by the temptation to write a paragraph just to get out of a difficult situation.

  At the cheap hotel where I lived for almost a year, the owners began to treat me like a member of the family. My only fortune at the time consisted of
my historic sandals, two changes of clothing that I washed in the shower, and the leather briefcase I had stolen from the most exclusive tearoom in Bogota during the disturbances of April 9. I carried it everywhere with the originals of whatever I was writing, which was the only thing I had to lose. I would not have risked leaving it under seven locks and keys in the armored vault of a bank. The only person to whom I had entrusted it during my first nights there was Lacides, the secretive hotel porter, who accepted it as security for the price of my room. He gave intense scrutiny to the strips of typewritten paper entwined in corrections and put the briefcase away in the drawer of the counter. I ransomed it the next day at the time I had promised and continued meeting my payments with so much rigor that he would accept it as a pledge for as many as three successive nights. This became so serious an understanding that sometimes I would leave it on the counter without saying anything more than good evening, and take the key down from the board myself and go up to my room.

  German was always aware of my needs, to the point of knowing if I did not have a place to sleep, and he would slip me the peso and a half for a bed. I never knew how he knew. Thanks to my good behavior I grew close to the hotel personnel, to the point where the little whores would lend me their own soap for my shower. Presiding over life at the command post, with her sidereal breasts and calabash cranium, was the hotel's owner and mistress, Catalina la Grande. Her full-time man, the mulatto Jonas San Vicente, had been a deluxe trumpet player until his gold-filled teeth were knocked out in a mugging meant to steal everything he had. Battered and without the wind to play, he had to change professions and could find nothing better for his six-inch tool than the golden bed of Catalina la Grande. She too had an intimate treasure that in two years helped her to climb from miserable nights on the river docks to the throne of a great madam. I had the luck to become familiar with the cleverness and free hand of both in making their friends happy. But they never understood why I so often did not have the peso and a half to sleep and yet very elegant people came to pick me up in official limousines.