Living to Tell the Tale

  I do not believe I had enough political maturity to be affected, but the truth is that I suffered a relapse similar to the previous one. I felt so bogged down that my only diversion was to stay up all night singing with the drunks in Las Bovedas, the vaults at the walls, which had been soldiers' brothels during the colonial period and then a sinister political prison. General Francisco de Paula Santander had served an eight-month sentence there before he was exiled to Europe by his comrades in cause and in arms.

  The custodian of those historical relics was a retired linotypist whose active colleagues met there with him after the papers went to press to celebrate the new day every day with a demijohn of clandestine white rum made by the arts of horse thieves. They were educated typographers by family tradition, dramatic grammarians, and great Saturday drinkers. I joined their brotherhood.

  The youngest was named Guillermo Davila, and he had accomplished the feat of working on the coast in spite of the intransigence of some regional leaders who resisted admitting Cachacos into the brotherhood. Perhaps he accomplished this by means of the art of his art, because in addition to his good trade and personal charm he was a marvelous illusionist. He kept us dazzled with the magical mischief of making live birds come out of desk drawers or leaving the paper blank on which the editorial was written that we had just turned in as the edition was about to close. Maestro Zabala, so uncompromising in his duty, forgot for an instant about Paderewski and the proletarian revolution, and requested applause for the magician with the warning, always repeated and always disobeyed, that this was the last time. For me, sharing the daily routine with a magician was like discovering reality at last.

  On one of those dawns in Las Bovedas, Davila told me his idea of putting out a newspaper measuring twenty-four by twenty-four--half a standard sheet of paper--that would be distributed free of charge at the busy time in the afternoons when businesses closed. It would be the smallest newspaper in the world, meant to be read in ten minutes. And it was. It was called Comprimido (Condensed), I wrote it in an hour at eleven in the morning, Davila typeset and printed it in two hours, and a daring newsboy who did not even have enough breath to shout its name more than once handed it out.

  It came out on Tuesday, September 18, 1951, and it is impossible to conceive of a more overwhelming or short-lived success: three editions in three days. Davila confessed to me that not even with an act of black magic would he have been able to conceive of so great an idea at so little cost, that would fit into so small a space, be executed in so short a time, and disappear with such great speed. The strangest thing was that for an instant on the second day, intoxicated by the scramble of takers on the street and the fervor of fans, I came to think that the solution to my life might be this simple. The dream lasted until Thursday, when the manager showed us that one more edition would leave us bankrupt even if we decided to publish advertisements, for they would have to be so small and so expensive there was no rational solution. The very concept of the paper, based on its size, brought with it the mathematical seed of its own destruction: the more it sold the more unaffordable it was.

  I was left in a difficult position. The move to Cartagena had been opportune and useful after my experience on Cronica, and it also provided a very favorable environment for continuing to write Leaf Storm, above all because of the creative fever with which we lived in our house, where the most unusual things always seemed possible. It would be enough for me to recall a lunch when we were talking to my papa about the difficulty many writers had in writing their memoirs when they no longer could remember anything. Cuqui, just six years old, drew the conclusion with masterful simplicity:

  "Then," he said, "the first thing a writer ought to write is his memoirs, when he can still remember everything."

  I did not dare confess that the same thing that had happened to me with La casa was happening with Leaf Storm: I was becoming more interested in the technique than in the subject. After a year of working with so much euphoria, the novel revealed itself to me as a circular labyrinth without an entrance or an exit. Today I believe I know why. The costumbrismo* that offered such good examples of renovation in its origins had, in the end, fossilized the great national themes that were trying to open emergency exits. The fact is I could not bear another minute of uncertainty. I only needed to verify some information and make some stylistic decisions before putting in the final period, and still I could not feel it breathing. But I was so bogged down after so much time working in the dark that I saw the book foundering and did not know where the cracks were. The worst thing was that at this point in the writing no one could help me, because the fissures were not in the text but inside me, and only I had the eyes to see them and the heart to endure them. Perhaps for this same reason I suspended "La Jirafa" without thinking too much about it when I finished paying El Heraldo the advance I had used to buy the furniture.

  Sad to say, neither ingenuity, resistance, nor love were enough to defeat poverty. Everything seemed to favor it. The census had ended after a year, and my salary at El Universal was not enough to compensate. I did not return to the faculty of law in spite of the stratagems of certain teachers who had conspired to move me ahead despite my disinterest in their interest and erudition. At home everyone's money was not enough, but the hole was so large that my contribution was never enough and the lack of hope affected me more than the lack of money.

  "If we're all going to drown," I said at lunch on a decisive day, "let me save myself so I can at least try to send you a lifeboat."

  And so the first week in December I moved back to Barranquilla, with everyone resigned, certain the boat would come. Alfonso Fuenmayor must have imagined it at first glance when he saw me walk unannounced into our old office at El Heraldo, for the Cronica office had been left without funds. He looked up at me from his typewriter as if I were a ghost and exclaimed in alarm:

  "What the hell are you doing here without letting anyone know!"

  Few times in my life have I given an answer so close to the truth:

  "It's all a pain in my balls, Maestro."

  Alfonso calmed down.

  "Ah, good!" he replied in his usual way, citing the most Colombian line from the national anthem. "It's our good fortune: that's how all of humankind is, moaning in their chains."

  He did not show the slightest curiosity about the reason for my trip. It seemed like a kind of telepathy to him, because he had told everyone who had asked about me in recent months that at any moment I would be coming back to stay. He was happy as he got up from his desk and put on his jacket, because I had arrived like a gift from heaven. He was half an hour late for an appointment, he had not finished the next day's editorial, and he asked me to finish it for him. I just had time to ask him what the subject was, and as he ran down the hallway he answered in an offhand manner that was typical of the way we were friends:

  "Read it and you'll find out."

  The next day there were two typewriters facing each other again in the office of El Heraldo, and I was writing "La Jirafa" again for the same page. And--of course!--at the same price. And with the same close association between Alfonso and me, in which many editorials had paragraphs by one or the other and it was impossible to distinguish them. Some students of journalism or of literature have tried to differentiate them in the archives and have not been able to, except in the case of specific subjects, not because of the style but because of the cultural information.

  At El Tercer Hombre I was saddened by the bad news that they had killed our friend the thief. On a night like every other he had gone out to ply his trade, and the only thing anyone knew, with no further details, was that he had been shot through the heart in the house that he was robbing. The body was claimed by an older sister, his sole relative, and only we and the owner of the tavern attended his charity funeral.

  I returned to the house of the Avila sisters. Meira Delmar, my neighbor once again, continued purifying my bad nights at El Gato Negro with her tranquil evenings. She and her sist
er Alicia seemed like twins because of their natures, and because they made time circular for us when we were with them. In some very special way they were still in the group. At least once a year they invited us to a meal of Arab delicacies that nourished our soul, and in their house there were unexpected evenings with illustrious visitors, from great artists in any genre to mad poets. I think they and Maestro Pedro Biava were the ones who imposed order on my misguided melomania and enrolled me in the happy crowd at the arts center.

  Today it seems to me that Barranquilla gave me a better perspective on Leaf Storm, for as soon as I had a desk and typewriter, I began correcting it with renewed energy. At this time I dared to show the group the first legible copy, knowing it was not finished. We had talked so much about it that there was no need for any kind of warning. Alfonso spent two days writing across from me without even mentioning it. By the third day, when we had finished our assignments late in the afternoon, he put the rough draft on his desk and read the pages he had marked with slips of paper. More than a critic, he seemed like a tracker of the inconsequential and a purifier of style. His observations were so unerring that I used them all, except one that seemed farfetched to him even after I proved that it was a real episode from my childhood.

  "Even reality is mistaken when the literature is bad," he said, weak with laughter.

  German Vargas's method was that if the text was all right he made no immediate comments but gave a soothing opinion and ended with an exclamation point:

  "Damn fine!"

  But in the days that followed he kept throwing out strings of scattered ideas about the book, which would culminate on some night of drinking with a well-aimed opinion. If he did not like the rough draft, he met with the author alone and told him so with so much frankness and elegance that the apprentice could only thank him with all his heart even though he wanted to cry. That was not the case with me. On a day when I did not anticipate it, German made a half-joking, half-serious comment about my rough draft that returned my soul to my body.

  Alvaro had disappeared from the Japy without any signs of life. Almost a week later, when I least expected it, he blocked my way with his car on the Paseo Bolivar, and shouted in his best manner:

  "Get in, Maestro, I'm going to fuck you over for being an idiot!"

  It was his anesthetic sentence. We drove without a destination around the business center, burning in the summer heat, while Alvaro shouted a somewhat emotional but impressive analysis of his reading. He interrupted it each time he saw someone he knew on the sidewalk in order to yell a cordial or mocking absurdity at him, and then resumed his impassioned harangue, with his voice cracking with the strain, his hair disheveled, and those bulging eyes that seemed to look at me through the bars of a panopticon. We ended up drinking cold beer on the terrace of Los Almendros, overwhelmed by the shrieking fans of Junior and Sporting across the street, and then overrun by the avalanche of maniacs who escaped from the stadium deflated by a contemptible score of 2-2. At the last minute Alvaro called his only definitive opinion about the rough draft of my book through the car window:

  "In any case, Maestro, you still have a lot of costumbrismo!"

  Grateful, I managed to shout back:

  "But it's the good Faulkner kind!"

  And he put an end to everything not said or thought with a phenomenal guffaw:

  "Don't be a sonuvabitch!"

  Fifty years later, whenever I remember that afternoon, I can hear his explosive outburst of laughter again, resonating like a shower of stones on the burning street.

  It was clear to me that the three of them had liked the novel, with their personal and perhaps correct reservations, but they did not say it in so many words, perhaps because that seemed like an easy tactic to them. No one talked about publishing it, which was also very typical of them, for whom the important thing was writing well. The rest was a matter for publishers.

  Which is to say: I was back again in our same old Barranquilla, but my misfortune was my awareness that this time I would not have the heart to go on with "La Jirafa." In reality it had fulfilled its mission of imposing on me a daily job of carpentry so I could learn how to write, starting from zero, with tenacity and the fierce aspiration to be a distinctive writer. On many occasions I could not handle the subject, and I would change it for another when I realized it was still too big for me. In any case, it was essential gymnastics for my formation as a writer, with the comfortable certainty that it was no more than a source of nourishment without any historical commitment.

  The simple search for a daily subject had made my first few months bitter. It did not leave me time for anything else: I lost hours scrutinizing other newspapers, I took notes on private conversations, I became lost in fantasies that disturbed my sleep until real life came out to meet me. In that sense, my happiest experience occurred one afternoon when I saw from a passing bus a simple sign on the door of a house: "Funeral palms for sale."

  My first impulse was to knock at the door in order to ascertain the facts of that discovery, but shyness vanquished me. And so life itself taught me that one of the most useful secrets for writing is to learn to read the hieroglyphs of reality without knocking or asking anything. In recent years this became much clearer to me when I reread the more than four hundred published "jirafas" and compared them to some of the literary texts they had given rise to.

  At Christmas the staff of El Espectador arrived on vacation, beginning with the publisher Don Gabriel Cano, with all his children: Luis Gabriel, the manager; Guillermo, who was then deputy editor; Alfonso, the assistant manager, and Fidel, the youngest, an apprentice in everything. With them was Eduardo Zalamea, Ulises, who had a special value for me because of the publication of my stories and his introductory note. It was their custom to enjoy as a group the first week of the new year at Pradomar, a resort ten leagues from Barranquilla, where they took over the bar by storm. The only thing I recall with any precision in that tumult is that Ulises in person was one of the great surprises of my life. I had often seen him in Bogota, at first in El Molino and years later in El Automatico, and sometimes at Maestro de Greiff's tertulia. I remembered his unsociable appearance and his metal voice, and on that basis I concluded that he was bad-tempered, which no doubt was the reputation he had among the good readers at the university. As a consequence I had avoided him on various occasions in order not to contaminate the image I had invented for my own personal use. I was mistaken. He was one of the most affectionate and obliging people I can remember, though I understand he needed a special reason of the mind or heart. His temperament was nothing like that of Don Ramon Vinyes, Alvaro Mutis, or Leon de Greiff, but he shared with them an innate aptitude for teaching at any hour, and the uncommon luck of having read all the books that had to be read.

  I became more than a friend of the younger Canos--Luis Gabriel, Guillermo, Alfonso, and Fidel--when I worked as a reporter at El Espectador. It would be reckless to try to recall any dialogue from those free-for-all conversations during the nights in Pradomar, but it would also be impossible to forget their unbearable insistence on the mortal sickness of journalism and literature. They made me another member of the family and their personal storyteller, discovered and adopted by them and for them. But I do not remember--as has been said so often--anybody even suggesting that I go to work with them. I did not regret it, because at that bad moment I did not have the slightest idea what my destiny would be or if I would be allowed to choose it.

  Alvaro Mutis, enthusiastic about the enthusiasm of the Canos, returned to Barranquilla when he was named head of public relations for Colombian Esso and tried to persuade me to work with him in Bogota. His real mission, however, was much more dramatic: through a terrifying error by some local concessionaire, the tanks at the airport had been filled with gasoline for cars instead of planes, and it was unthinkable that an aircraft filled with that mistaken fuel could go anywhere. Mutis's job was to correct the mistake in absolute secrecy before dawn without the airport officials finding
out, much less the press. And he did. The fuel was changed to the correct kind in four hours of conversation and whiskey at the storage tanks of the local airport. We had more than enough time to talk about everything, but the unimaginable subject for me was that Editorial Losada of Buenos Aires would publish the novel I was about to finish. Alvaro Mutis knew this from direct communication with the new manager of Losada in Bogota, Julio Cesar Villegas, a former minister of the government of Peru who had taken refuge not long before in Colombia.

  I do not remember a more intense emotion. Editorial Losada was one of the best in Buenos Aires, filling the publishing vacuum created by the Spanish Civil War. Its editors nourished us on a daily basis with new books that were so interesting and unusual we almost had no time to read them. Its salespeople were punctual in bringing us the books we had ordered, and we welcomed them as messengers of joy. The mere idea that one of them might publish Leaf Storm almost drove me mad. As soon as I said goodbye to Mutis in a plane filled with the correct fuel, I ran to the paper to do a thorough revision of the original.

  In the days that followed I dedicated all my time to the frantic examination of a text that very well might have gotten away from me. There were no more than one hundred twenty double-spaced pages, but I made so many adjustments, changes, and inventions that I never knew if I left it better or worse. German and Alfonso reread the most critical parts and had the kindness not to make irredeemable observations. In that state of apprehension I revised the final version, my heart in my hand, and made the serene decision not to publish it. In the future, this would become a mania. Once I felt satisfied with a completed book, I was left with the devastating impression that I would not be able to write another one that was better.