Living to Tell the Tale

  "Be still, damn it," she shouted, "or the curlews will peck out your eyes!"

  It mattered only to me, because I was the only one who did not have the heart to taste the sacrilegious stew. Instead of going to sleep, I hurried to the Cronica office and wrote in a single sitting the story about three patrons in a bordello whose eyes were pecked out by curlews and nobody believed it. It had only four office-size pages, double spaced, and it was told in the first person plural by a nameless voice. Its realism is evident and yet it is the most enigmatic of my stories, and it also turned me onto a path I was about to abandon because I could not follow it. I had begun writing at four in the morning on Friday and finished at eight, tormented by a prophet's blinding light. With the infallible complicity of Porfirio Mendoza, the historic typesetter at El Heraldo, I altered the layout for the edition of Cronica that would circulate the next day. At the last minute, desperate because of the guillotine of going to press, I dictated to Porfirio the definitive title I had found at last, and he wrote it straight into molten lead: "The Night of the Curlews."

  For me it was the beginning of a new era, after nine stories that were still in metaphysical limbo and when I had no plans to continue with a genre I could not manage to grasp. The following month, Jorge Zalamea reproduced it in Critica, an excellent journal of important poetry. I reread it fifty years later, before I wrote this paragraph, and I believe I would not change even a comma. In the midst of the disorder without a compass in which I was living, that was the beginning of spring.

  The country, on the other hand, was going into a tailspin. Laureano Gomez had returned from New York to be proclaimed the Conservative candidate for the presidency of the Republic. Liberalism abstained in the face of the empire of violence, and Gomez was elected as the lone candidate on August 7, 1950. Since Congress was in adjournment, he took office before the Supreme Court.

  He almost had no chance to govern in person, for after fifteen months he retired from the presidency for real reasons of health. He was replaced by the Conservative jurist and parliamentarian Roberto Urdaneta Arbelaez, in his capacity as first deputy of the Republic. Shrewd observers interpreted this as a formula, very typical of Laureano Gomez, to leave power in other hands but not lose it, and to continue governing from his house by means of an intermediary. And in urgent cases, by means of the telephone.

  I think that the return of Alvaro Cepeda with his degree from Columbia University a month before the sacrifice of the curlew was decisive for enduring the grim prospects of those days. He came back with more disheveled hair and without his brush mustache, and wilder than when he left. German Vargas and I, who had been expecting him for several months fearful that he had been tamed in New York, died laughing when we saw him leave the plane in a jacket and tie, waving at us from the steps with Hemingway's latest: Across the River and into the Trees. I tore it out of his hands, caressed it on both sides, and when I tried to ask him something, Alvaro anticipated me:

  "It's a piece of shit!"

  German Vargas, weak with laughter, whispered into my ear: "He's just the same." But Alvaro clarified for us later that his opinion of the book was a joke, because he had just started to read it on the flight from Miami. In any case, what raised our spirits was that he brought back with him, more virulent than ever, the measles rash of journalism, movies, and literature. In the months that followed, as he reacclimated, he kept our fever at 104 degrees.

  The contagion was immediate. "La Jirafa," which for months had been circling around itself tapping a blind man's stick, began to breathe with two fragments plundered from the rough draft of La casa. One was "The Colonel's Son," never born, and the other was "Ny," a fugitive girl at whose door I knocked very often looking for different paths, and she never answered. I also recovered my adult interest in comic strips, not as a Sunday pastime but as a new literary genre condemned without reason to the nursery. My hero, one of many, was Dick Tracy. And, of course, I also recovered the cult of the movies that my grandfather had inculcated in me, that had been nourished by Don Antonio Daconte in Aracataca, and that Alvaro Cepeda converted into an evangelical passion for a country where the best movies were known through the tales of pilgrims. It was fortunate that his return coincided with the opening of two masterpieces: Intruder in the Dust, directed by Clarence Brown and based on the novel by William Faulkner, and Portrait of Jenny, directed by William Dieterle and based on the novel by Robert Nathan. I commented on both of them in "La Jirafa" after long discussions with Alvaro Cepeda. I became so interested that I began to look at films with a different eye. Before I knew him I did not realize that the most important thing was the name of the director, which is the last one that appears in the credits. For me it was a simple question of writing scripts and managing actors, since the rest was done by the countless members of the crew. When Alvaro returned he gave me a complete course based on shouts and white rum until dawn at tables in the worst taverns, in order to teach me by force what they had taught him about movies in the United States, and we would stay up all night with the waking dream of doing the same thing in Colombia.

  Aside from those luminous explosions, the impression of the friends who followed Alvaro at his cruising speed was that he did not have the serenity to sit down to write. Those of us who lived close to him could not conceive of him sitting for more than an hour at any desk. But two or three months after his return, Tita Manotas--his sweetheart of many years and his lifelong wife--called us in terror to say that Alvaro had sold his historic station wagon and left behind in the glove compartment the originals, that had no copies, of his unpublished stories. He made no effort to find them, using an argument typical of him that they were "six or seven pieces of shit." Those of us who were his friends and correspondents helped Tita in her search for the station wagon, which had been sold several more times, all along the Caribbean coast and inland as far as Medellin. At last we found it in a shop in Sincelejo, some two hundred kilometers away. We entrusted the originals, on ragged and incomplete strips of newsprint, to Tita, for fear Alvaro would misplace them again through negligence or on purpose.

  Two of those stories were published in Cronica, and German Vargas kept the rest for some two years until a publishing solution was found. The painter Cecilia Porras, always faithful to the group, illustrated them with inspired drawings that were an X ray of Alvaro dressed as everything he could be at the same time: truck driver, carnival clown, mad poet, Columbia student, or any other occupation except being a common, ordinary man. The book was published by Libreria Mundo with the title We Were All Waiting, and it was a publishing event that went unnoticed only by academic critics. For me--and this is what I wrote at the time--it was the best book of stories that had been published in Colombia.

  Alfonso Fuenmayor, for his part, wrote comments as a critic and teacher of letters in newspapers and magazines, but he was very shy about collecting them in books. He was a reader of extraordinary voracity, comparable perhaps to that of Alvaro Mutis or Eduardo Zalamea. German Vargas and he were powerful critics, more so with their own stories than with those of others, but their mania for finding youthful values never failed them. That was the creative spring when the insistent rumor circulated that German was staying up all night writing masterful stories, but nothing was known about them until many years later when he locked himself in his bedroom in his father's house and burned them just hours before marrying my comadre Susana Linares, so that he could be certain they would not be read, not even by her. It was assumed that they were stories and essays, perhaps the first draft of a novel, but German never said a word about them either before or after, and only on the eve of his wedding did he take drastic precautions so that no one, including the woman who would be his wife the next day, would ever find out. Susana knew what he was doing but did not go into the room to stop him because her mother-in-law would not have permitted it. "In those days," Susi told me years later with her trenchant humor, "a girl could not go into her fiance's bedroom before they were married."
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  Less than a year had gone by when the letters from Don Ramon began to be less explicit and more and more melancholy and sketchy. I went into the Libreria Mundo on May 7, 1952, at twelve noon, and German did not have to say anything for me to know that Don Ramon had died, two days earlier, in the Barcelona of his dreams. The only comment, as we walked to the midday cafe, was the same for everyone:

  "I can't believe it!"

  I was not conscious at the time that this was a different kind of year in my life, but today I have no doubt that it was decisive. Until then I had been content with my dissolute appearance. I was loved and respected by many, and admired by some, in a city where people lived in their own way and manner. I had an intense social life, I took part in artistic and social debates wearing my pilgrim's sandals that looked as if they had been bought to imitate Alvaro Cepeda, with one pair of linen trousers and two twill shirts that I washed in the shower.

  From one day to the next, for a variety of reasons--some of them too frivolous--I began to improve my clothing, cut my hair like a recruit, trimmed my mustache, and learned to wear a pair of senator's shoes given to me unworn by Dr. Rafael Marriaga, an itinerant member of the group and a historian of the city, because they were too big for him. Through the unconscious dynamic of social climbing, I began to feel that I was suffocating from the heat in the room at The Skyscraper, as if Aracataca had been in Siberia, and to suffer on account of transient guests who spoke in loud voices when they woke up, and to never weary of grumbling because the little birds of the night continued to flood their rooms with entire crews of freshwater sailors.

  Today I realize that my beggar's appearance was not because I was poor or a poet but because my energies were concentrated in a profound way on the stubborn difficulties of learning to write. As soon as I could see the right path I left The Skyscraper and moved to the tranquil El Prado district, its urban and social opposite, two blocks from the house of Meira Delmar and five from the historic hotel where the sons of the rich danced with their virgin sweethearts after Sunday Mass. Or as German said: I began to improve for the worse.

  I lived in the house of the Avila sisters--Esther, Mayito, and Tona--whom I had known in Sucre, and who for some time had been bent on saving me from perdition. Instead of a cardboard cubicle where I shed so many of the scales I had accumulated as a spoiled grandson, I had my own bedroom with a private bath and a window overlooking the garden, and three meals a day for very little more than my carter's salary. I bought a pair of trousers and half a dozen tropical shirts printed with flowers and birds, which for a time won me secret fame as a shipboard faggot. Old friends whom I had not run into again I now found everywhere I went. I discovered to my delight that they quoted from memory the nonsense from "La Jirafa," were devoted fans of Cronica because of what they called its sportsmanlike integrity, and even read my stories without really understanding them. I ran into Ricardo Gonzalez Ripoll, my dormitory neighbor at the Liceo Nacional, who had settled in Barranquilla with his architect's degree and in less than a year had resolved his life with a tail-finned Chevrolet of uncertain age into which he could pack up to eight passengers at dawn. Three times a week he would pick me up at home early in the evening to go carousing with new friends obsessed with setting the country to rights, some with formulas of political magic and others by fighting with the police.

  When she learned of these developments, my mother sent me a message very typical of her: "Money calls to money." I did not tell the members of the group anything about the change until one night when I met them at the table in the Cafe Japy, and I seized on the brilliant formula of Lope de Vega: "I took orders, and so it suited me to order my life in line with my disorder." I do not remember comparable catcalls even in a soccer stadium. German wagered I would not have a single idea away from The Skyscraper. According to Alvaro, I would not survive the cramps that come with three meals a day at regular hours. Alfonso, on the other hand, protested the abusiveness of intervening in my private life and buried the subject with a discussion regarding the urgency of making radical decisions about the future of Cronica. I think at bottom they felt guilty about my disorder but were too decent not to give thanks for my decision with a sigh of relief.

  Contrary to expectations, my health and morale improved. I was reading less because of lack of time, but I raised the tone of "La Jirafa" and forced myself to continue writing Leaf Storm in my new room, on the prehistoric typewriter that Alfonso Fuenmayor lent me, during the small hours I had wasted earlier with Mono Guerra. On a normal afternoon in the newsroom at the paper I could write "La Jirafa," an editorial, some of my many unsigned articles, the condensation of a detective story, and last-minute pieces before Cronica went to press. It was fortunate that instead of becoming easier as the days passed, the novel-in-progress began to impose its own criteria in opposition to mine, and I was ingenuous enough to understand this as a symptom of favorable winds.

  My mood was so resolute that in an emergency I improvised my tenth story--"Someone Is Messing Up These Roses," because the political commentator for whom we had reserved three pages in Cronica for a last-minute article had suffered a serious heart attack. I discovered only when I corrected the printed proof of my story that it was another static drama of the kind I wrote without thinking. This reversal intensified my remorse for having awakened a friend a little before midnight so that he would write the article in less than three hours. In this penitential spirit I wrote the story in the same amount of time, and on Monday I again brought up to the editorial board the urgency of our going out on the street to pull the magazine out of its doldrums with hard-hitting articles. But the idea--which was everyone's--was rejected once again with an argument favorable to my happiness: given the idyllic notion we had about reporting, if we went out on the street the magazine would never again come out on time--if it came out at all. I should have understood this as a compliment, but I never could overcome the disagreeable idea that the real reason was their unpleasant memory of my article on Berascochea.

  A good consolation at that time was the telephone call from Rafael Escalona, the composer of the songs that were sung and are still being sung on this side of the world. Barranquilla was a vital center because of frequent visits from the troubadours of the accordion whom we had met at the fiestas in Aracataca, and because of their intense exposure on the radio stations along the Caribbean coast. A very well-known singer at the time was Guillermo Buitrago, who boasted of keeping new songs from the Province up-to-date. Another who was very popular was Crescencio Salcedo, a barefoot Indian who would stand on the corner of the Americana to sing without ceremony songs of his own and other people's creation, in a voice that had some tin in it, but with a very personal art that imposed itself on the daily crowd on Calle San Blas. I had spent a good part of my early youth standing near him, not even greeting him, not letting myself be seen, until I learned by heart his vast repertoire of everybody's songs.

  The culmination of that passion reached its climax one torpid afternoon when the telephone interrupted me as I was writing "La Jirafa." A voice like those of so many people I knew in my childhood greeted me with no preliminary formulas:

  "What's doing, brother? I'm Rafael Escalona."

  Five minutes later we met at a reserved table in the Cafe Roma to begin a lifelong friendship. As soon as we exchanged greetings I began to press Escalona to sing his latest songs. Isolated lines, in a voice that was very low and well modulated, which he accompanied by drumming his fingers on the table. In each stanza the popular poetry of our lands strolled by wearing a new dress. "I'll give you a bouquet of forget-me-nots so you'll do what their meaning says," he sang. For my part, I showed him that I knew by heart the best songs of his home, which I had pulled since I was very young from the tumultuous river of the oral tradition. But what surprised him most was that I talked to him about the Province as if I knew it.

  Days earlier, Escalona had traveled by bus from Villanueva to Valledupar while he composed in his mind the music and
lyrics of a new song for Carnival on the following Sunday. It was his primary method because he did not know how to write music or play any instrument. In one of the towns along the way, a wandering troubadour with sandals and an accordion got on the bus, one of the countless men who traveled the region from fair to fair to sing. Escalona had him sit beside him and sang into his ear the two completed stanzas of his new song.

  The happy troubadour got off in the middle of the road, and Escalona stayed on the bus until Valledupar, where he had to go to bed to sweat out the 104-degree fever of a common cold. Three days later was the Sunday of Carnival, and the unfinished song that Escalona had sung in secret to his passing friend swept away all the music, old and new, from Valledupar to Cabo de la Vela. Only he knew who had divulged it while he was sweating out his Carnival fever, and gave it the name "La vieja Sara."

  The story is true but not strange in a region and in a guild where the most natural thing is what is astonishing. The accordion, not a native or widespread instrument in Colombia, is popular in the province of Valledupar and may have been imported from Aruba and Curacao. During the Second World War its importation from Germany was interrupted, and those that were already in the Province survived because of the care given them by their native owners. One was Leandro Diaz, a carpenter who not only was an inspired composer and master of the accordion, but the only man during the war who knew how to repair them even though he was blind from birth. The way of life of these genuine troubadours is to go from town to town and sing the amusing and simple facts of ordinary history, at religious or pagan celebrations, and above all in the wild confusion of Carnival. Rafael Escalona's case was different. The son of Colonel Clemente Escalona, the nephew of the celebrated Bishop Celedon, and the holder of a baccalaureate from the liceo in Santa Marta that bears his name, he began to compose when he was very young, scandalizing his family who considered singing with an accordion something that day laborers did. Not only was he the only troubadour with a baccalaureate degree, he was one of the few in those days who knew how to read and write, and the haughtiest, most amorous man who ever existed. But he is not and will not be the last: now there are hundreds of them, younger and younger each day. Bill Clinton understood it this way in the final days of his presidency, when he listened to a group of primary-school children who traveled from the Province to sing for him at the White House.