Living to Tell the Tale

  During those days of good fortune I happened to run into Mercedes Barcha, the daughter of the pharmacist in Sucre to whom I had been proposing marriage since she was thirteen. In contrast to those other times, at last she accepted an invitation to go dancing the following Sunday at the hotel in El Prado. Only then did I learn that she had moved to Barranquilla with her family because of a political situation that was growing more and more oppressive. Demetrio, her father, was a hardcore Liberal who was not intimidated by the early threats against him when the persecution and social ignominy of the pasquines worsened. But under pressure from his family, he sold off the few things he had left in Sucre and set up his pharmacy in Barranquilla, close to the hotel in El Prado. Although he was the age of my papa, he always maintained a youthful friendship with me that we would heat up at the tavern across the street, and more than once we ended up in a galley slave's drunken carousing with the entire group at El Tercer Hombre. At that time Mercedes was studying in Medellin and spent time with her family only during Christmas vacation. She always was amusing and amiable with me, but she had an illusionist's talent for evading questions and answers and not allowing herself to be explicit about anything. I had to accept this as a more compassionate stratagem than indifference or rejection, and I resigned myself to her seeing me with her father and his friends in the tavern across the street. If he did not suspect my interest during that vacation of longing, it was because it was the best-kept secret of the first twenty centuries of Christianity. On various occasions he boasted in El Tercer Hombre about the sentence she had quoted to me in Sucre at our first dance: "My papa says that the prince who will marry me hasn't been born yet." I also did not know if she believed him, but she behaved as if she did, until that Christmas holiday when she agreed that we would meet the following Sunday at the morning dance at the hotel in El Prado. I am so superstitious that I attributed her decision to the artist's hairstyle and mustache that the barber had made for me, and the unbleached linen suit and silk tie bought for the occasion at an auction run by Turks. Certain that she would go there with her father, as she did wherever she went, I also invited my sister Aida Rosa, who was spending her vacation with me. But Mercedes showed up very much alone, and she danced with so much naturalness and so much irony that any serious proposal would have seemed ridiculous to her. That day was the beginning of the unforgettable season of my compadre Pacho Galan, the glorious creator of the merecumbe that was danced for years and gave rise to new Caribbean airs that are still alive. She danced very well to popular music, and she used her mastery to elude with magical subtlety the proposals that pursued her. It seems to me her tactic was to make me believe she did not think I was serious, but with so much skill that I always found the way to move ahead.

  At twelve sharp she became alarmed about the time and left me standing while the music was still playing, but she did not want me to accompany her even to the door. This seemed so strange to my sister that in some way she felt responsible, and I still wonder if that sad example did not have something to do with her sudden decision to enter the Salesian convent in Medellin. In time, after that day, Mercedes and I invented a personal code with which we understood each other without saying anything, and even without seeing each other.

  I heard from her again after a month, on January 22 of the following year, with an unadorned message that she left for me at El Heraldo: "They killed Cayetano." For us it could be only one person: Cayetano Gentile, our friend in Sucre, a soon-to-be doctor, an organizer of dances, and a lover by trade. The immediate version was that he had been knifed by two brothers of the young teacher at the school in Chaparral: we had seen him ride with her on his horse. In the course of the day, from one telegram to the next, I learned the complete story.

  It was still not the time of easy telephones, and personal long-distance calls were arranged first by telegram. My immediate reaction was a reporter's. I decided to travel to Sucre to write the story, but at the paper they interpreted this as a sentimental impulse. And today I understand, because even back then we Colombians killed one another for any reason at all, and at times we invented one, but crimes of passion were reserved as luxuries for the rich in the cities. It seemed to me that the subject was eternal and I began to take statements from witnesses, until my mother discovered my hidden intentions and begged me not to write the article. At least while Cayetano's mother, Dona Julieta Chimento, was alive, the most important of the reasons being that she was my mother's comadre because she had been godmother at the baptism of Hernando, my brother number eight. Her statement--indispensable in a good article--was of great significance. Two of the teacher's brothers had pursued Cayetano when he tried to take refuge in his house, but Dona Julieta had hurried to lock the street door because she believed that her son was already in his bedroom. And so he was the one who could not come in, and they stabbed him to death against the locked door.

  My immediate reaction was to sit down to write the report of the crime but I found all kinds of impediments. What interested me was no longer the crime itself but the literary theme of collective responsibility. No argument convinced my mother, however, and it seemed a lack of respect to write it without her permission. But after that not a day went by that I was not hounded by the desire to write the story. I was beginning to become resigned, and then, many years later, I was waiting for a plane to take off at the airport in Algiers. The door to the first-class lounge opened, and an Arab prince came in wearing the immaculate tunic of his lineage, and carrying on his fist a splendid female peregrine falcon that instead of the leather hood of classic falconry wore one of gold encrusted with diamonds. Of course I thought of Cayetano Gentile, who had learned from his father the fine arts of falconry, at first with local sparrow hawks and then with magnificent examples transplanted from Arabia Felix. At the moment of his death he had a professional falcon coop on his farm, with two female cousins and a male trained to hunt partridges, and a Scottish kite skilled in personal defense. I knew about the historic interview of Ernest Hemingway by George Plimpton in The Paris Review regarding the process of transforming a character from real life into a character in a novel. Hemingway said: "If I explained how that is sometimes done, it would be a handbook for libel lawyers." But after that providential morning in Algiers, my situation was just the opposite: I had no desire to continue living in peace if I did not write the story of the death of Cayetano.

  My mother remained firm in her determination to prevent this despite every argument, until thirty years after the drama, when she herself called me in Barcelona to give me the sad news that Julieta Chimento, Cayetano's mother, had died without ever getting over the loss of her son. But this time, with her strong moral sense, my mother found no reasons to interfere with the article.

  "I ask only one thing as a mother," she said. "Treat Cayetano as if he were a son of mine."

  The story, with the title Chronicle of a Death Foretold, was published two years later. My mother did not read it for a reason that I keep as another of her gems in my personal museum: "Something that turned out so awful in life can't turn out well in a book."

  A week after the death of Cayetano, the telephone on my desk rang at five in the afternoon as I was beginning to write my daily assignment at El Heraldo. The call was from my papa, who had just arrived in Barranquilla unannounced and was waiting for me with some urgency at the Cafe Roma. The tension in his voice frightened me, but I was more alarmed at seeing him as I never had seen him before, disheveled and unshaven, wearing the April 9 sky-blue suit dusty with the suffocating heat of the road, sustained only by the strange placidity of the defeated.

  I was so overwhelmed that I do not feel capable of transmitting the anguish and lucidity with which Papa informed me of the family disaster. Sucre, paradise of the easy life and beautiful girls, had succumbed to the seismic onrush of political violence. The death of Cayetano was no more than a symptom.

  "You don't realize what that hell is like because you live in this oasis of peace," he sai
d. "But if we're still alive there it's because God knows us."

  He was one of the few members of the Conservative Party who had not needed to hide from raging Liberals after April 9, and now the same Conservatives who had taken refuge in his shadow were repudiating him for his half-heartedness. He painted a picture for me that was so terrifying--and so real--that it more than justified his rash decision to leave everything behind and take the family to Cartagena. I had no rational or emotional counterargument, but I thought I could slow him down with a solution less radical than an immediate move.

  We needed time to think. We had two soft drinks in silence, each of us lost in his own thoughts, and he recovered his feverish idealism before we finished and left me speechless. "The only thing that consoles me in all of this," he said with a tremulous sigh, "is my joy that at last you can finish your studies." I never told him how much I was affected by that illusive happiness for so trivial a reason. I felt an icy gust in my belly, set off by the perverse idea that the family's exodus was nothing more than a trick of his to oblige me to be a lawyer. I looked straight into his eyes and they were two astonished pools. I realized he was so defenseless and worried that he would not oblige me to do anything, and would not deny me anything, but he had enough faith in his Divine Providence to believe he could make me surrender through sheer exhaustion. Even more: with the same captive spirit he revealed that he had found me a position in Cartagena and had everything ready for me to begin the following Monday. A wonderful position, he explained, and I would only have to show up every two weeks to collect my salary.

  It was much more than I could digest. With clenched teeth I put forward a few misgivings to prepare him for my final refusal. I told him about the long conversation with my mother on the trip to Aracataca about which I had never received any comments from him, but I had understood that his indifference toward the subject was the best response. The saddest part was that I was playing with loaded dice, since I knew I would not be accepted into the university because I had failed two subjects in the second year, which I never made up, and another three in the third year that were unsalvageable. I had hidden this from the family to spare them unnecessary grief, and I did not even want to imagine what Papa's reaction would be if I told him that afternoon. At the beginning of our conversation I had resolved not to give in to any sentimental weakness, because it hurt me that so kind a man had to let himself be seen by his children in such a state of defeat. But it seemed to me that this meant placing too much confidence in life. In the end I surrendered to the easy formula of asking him for a night to think about it.

  "Agreed," he said, "as long as you don't lose sight of the fact that you hold the fate of the family in your hands."

  The condition was unnecessary. I was so aware of my weakness that when I saw him off on the last bus, at seven in the evening, I had to suborn my heart not to sit in the seat beside him. For me it was clear that we had gone full circle, and the family was so poor again that it could survive only with the assistance of all its members.

  It was not a good night for deciding anything. The police had removed by force several families of refugees fleeing the rural violence in the interior who had camped in the Parque San Nicolas. But the peace in Cafe Roma was impregnable. The Spanish refugees always asked me what I had heard from Don Ramon Vinyes, and I always told them as a joke that his letters did not carry news from Spain but worried questions about the news from Barranquilla. After he died they did not mention him again, but they kept his chair empty at the table. A member of his tertulia congratulated me for the previous day's "La Jirafa," which had reminded him somehow of the heartrending romanticism of Mariano Jose de Larra, and I never knew why. Professor Perez Domenech saved me from an awkward situation with one of his opportune remarks: "I hope you don't also follow his bad example and shoot yourself." I believe he would not have said it if he had known to what extent it might have been true that night.

  Half an hour later I led German Vargas by the arm to the back of Cafe Japy. As soon as we had been served I said that I had to have an urgent consultation with him. He froze, the cup halfway to his lips--identical to Don Ramon--and asked in alarm:

  "Where are you going?"

  His clairvoyance impressed me.

  "How the hell do you know!" I said.

  He did not know but had foreseen it, and he thought my resignation would be the end of Cronica, a grave lack of responsibility that would weigh on me for the rest of my life. He made it clear that this was little less than treason, and no one had more right than he to tell me so. No one knew what to do with Cronica, but we were all aware that Alfonso had supported it at a crucial moment, including investments beyond his means, so that I could never shake German free of the bad idea that my irremediable move was a death sentence for the magazine. I am certain that he, who understood everything, knew that my reasons were inescapable, but he fulfilled his moral duty to tell me what he thought.

  The next day, as he was driving me to the Cronica office, Alvaro Cepeda gave a moving demonstration of the turmoil that his friends' inner storms caused him. No doubt he already knew from German about my decision to leave, and his exemplary timidity saved both of us from any salon argument.

  "What the hell," he said. "Going to Cartagena isn't going anywhere. The fucked-up thing would be if you went to New York, like I had to do, but here I am again, in the flesh."

  It was the kind of parabolic response that helped him in cases like mine to leap past his desire to cry. By the same token I was not surprised that he chose to talk for the first time about the project of making films in Colombia, a conversation that we would continue without results for the rest of our lives. He brought it up in passing as an oblique way of leaving me with some hope, and he stopped short in the midst of the surging crowd and the little shops that sold trinkets on Calle San Blas.

  "I already told Alfonso," he shouted at me through the window, "to hell with the magazine: let's do one like Time!"

  My conversation with Alfonso was not easy for me or him because we had been postponing a clarification for six months, and we both suffered from a kind of mental stammer on difficult occasions. During one of my puerile tantrums in the typesetting room I had removed my name and title from the masthead of Cronica as a metaphor of my formal resignation, and when the storm had passed I forgot to replace them. No one noticed it except German Vargas, two weeks later, and he talked about it with Alfonso. It was a surprise for him as well. Porfirio, the head typesetter, told them about my tantrum, and they agreed to leave things as they were until I gave them my reasons. To my misfortune, I forgot about it altogether until the day Alfonso and I agreed I would leave Cronica. When we finished, he said goodbye to me weak with laughter at a joke that was typical of him, strong but irresistible.

  "The lucky thing is," he said, "that we don't even have to take your name off the masthead."

  Only then did I relive the incident as if it were a knife wound, and I felt the earth sinking beneath my feet, not because of what Alfonso had said in so opportune a way but because I had forgotten to clarify the matter. Alfonso, as was to be expected, gave me an adult interpretation. If it was the only injustice we had not aired, it was not decent to leave it pending without an explanation. Alfonso would take care of the rest with Alvaro and German, and if all of us were needed to save the boat, I could get back in two hours. As a last resort we were counting on the editorial board, a kind of Divine Providence that we never had managed to seat at the long walnut table of major decisions.

  The comments of German and Alvaro filled me with the courage I needed to leave. Alfonso understood my reasons and accepted them with a kind of relief, but in no way did he suggest that Cronica would come to an end with my resignation. On the contrary, he advised me to take the crisis with serenity, calmed me down with the idea of constructing a firm base with the editorial board, and said he would let me know when something could be done that in reality would be worthwhile.

  It was the first clue
I had that Alfonso could conceive of the unimaginable possibility that Cronica would end. And it did, without grief or glory, on June 28, after fifty-eight issues in fourteen months. But half a century later, I have the impression that the magazine was an important event in the nation's journalism. No complete collection remained, only the first six issues and some clippings in the Catalan library of Don Ramon Vinyes.

  A fortunate coincidence was that they wanted to change the living-room furniture in the house where I was living, and they offered it to me at a very reduced price. The night before I left, as I was settling accounts at El Heraldo, the paper agreed to pay me in advance for six months of "La Jirafa." With part of that money I bought Mayito's furniture for our house in Cartagena, because I knew the family was not taking what they had in Sucre and had no way to buy new furniture. I cannot omit that after fifty years it is in good condition and still in use, because my grateful mother never allowed it to be sold.

  A week after my father's visit I moved to Cartagena, taking only the furniture and little more than what I was wearing. In contrast to the first time, I knew how to do everything necessary, I was familiar with everything that might be needed in Cartagena, and I hoped with all my heart that things would go well for the family but not for me, as a punishment for my lack of character.