Living to Tell the Tale

  This time I got to know Manaure, in the heart of the sierra, a beautiful and tranquil town, historic in my family because that was where they took my mother for a change of climate when she was a girl and had a tertian fever that resisted all kinds of potions. I had heard so much about Manaure, about its May afternoons and medicinal breakfasts, that when I was there for the first time I realized I remembered it as if I had known it in a former life.

  We were having a cold beer in the only tavern in town when a man approached our table who looked like a tree, wore riding gaiters, and had a military revolver in his belt. Rafael Escalona introduced us, and he stood looking into my eyes, still holding my hand.

  "Do you have anything to do with Colonel Nicolas Marquez?" he asked.

  "I'm his grandson," I told him.

  "Then," he said, "your grandfather killed my grandfather."

  That is to say, he was the grandson of Medardo Pacheco, the man my grandfather had killed in a duel. He did not give me time to be frightened because he said it in a very warm manner, as if this too was a way of being kin. We caroused with him for three days and three nights in his double-bottomed truck, drinking warm brandy and eating stewed goat in memory of our dead grandfathers. Several days went by before he confessed the truth: he had arranged with Escalona to frighten me, but he did not have the heart to go on with the jokes about our dead grandfathers. In reality his name was Jose Prudencio Aguilar, and he was a smuggler by trade, an upright and goodhearted man. In homage to him, and to even the score, in One Hundred Years of Solitude I gave his name to the rival killed with a lance by Jose Arcadio Buendia in the cockfighting pit.

  The bad thing was that at the end of that nostalgic trip the books I had sold had not yet arrived, and without them I could not collect my advance. I was left without a centimo and the hotel metronome was moving faster than my nights of fiesta. Victor Cohen began to lose the little patience remaining to him because of the lie that I was squandering the money for his bill with low-class drunks and cheap sluts. The only thing that gave me back my peace of mind was the thwarted love affair in The Right to Be Born, the radio soap opera by Don Felix B. Caignet, whose popular impact revived my old illusions about sentimental literature. The unexpected reading of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, which came as a surprise in the magazine Life en Espanol, completed my recovery from my sorrows.

  In the same mail delivery the shipment of books arrived, which I had to distribute to their owners in order to collect my advance. Everyone paid on time, but by now I owed the hotel more than twice what I had earned, and Villegas warned me that I would not get anything else for another three weeks. Then I had a serious conversation with Victor Cohen, and he accepted an IOU with a guarantor. Since Escalona and his crew were not available, a providential friend did that favor for me with no obligations, just because he had liked a story of mine published in Cronica. But at the moment of truth I could not pay anyone.

  The IOU became historic years later when Victor Cohen would show it to his friends and visitors, not as an accusatory document but as a trophy. The last time I saw him he was almost one hundred years old, tall, slim, and lucid, and with his sense of humor intact. Almost fifty years later, at the baptism of the son of my comadre Consuelo Araujonoguera, for whom I was godfather, I saw the unpaid IOU. Victor Cohen showed it to anyone who wanted to see it, with his usual grace and courtesy. I was surprised by the neatness of the document he had written and the enormous will to pay that could be seen in the boldness of my signature. Victor celebrated it that night by dancing a vallenato promenade with the kind of colonial elegance no one had brought to that dance since the days of Francisco el Hombre. When it was over, many friends thanked me for not having paid the IOU that had given rise to that priceless night.

  The seductive magic of Dr. Villegas would produce even more, but not with books. It is not possible to forget the majestic skill with which he sidestepped creditors and the joy with which they understood his reasons for not paying on time. The most tempting of his subjects at the time had to do with the novel The Roads Have Been Closed, by the Barranquillan writer Olga Salcedo de Medina, which had provoked an uproar more social than literary, with few regional precedents. Inspired by the success of The Right to Be Born, which I had followed with growing interest for the entire month, I thought we were in the presence of a popular phenomenon we writers could not ignore. Without even referring to my debt, I had mentioned this to Villegas on my return from Valledupar, and he proposed that I write the adaptation with enough wickedness to triple the vast audience already caught up in the radio drama of Felix B. Caignet.

  I made the adaptation for radio broadcast in two weeks of seclusion that seemed much more revelatory than I had anticipated, with measured dialogues, degrees of intensity, and situations and quick tempos that in no way resembled anything I had written before. With my inexperience in dialogue--which still is not my forte--the effort was valuable and I was more grateful for what I learned than for what I earned. But I had no complaints about that either, because Villegas advanced me half the amount in cash and agreed to cancel my earlier debt with the first income from the soap opera.

  It was recorded at the Atlantico station, with the best possible regional distribution, and directed without experience or inspiration by Villegas himself. For the narrator, German Vargas had been recommended as a speaker who would be distinctive because of the contrast between his sobriety and the stridency of local radio. The first great surprise was that German agreed, and the second was that after the first rehearsal he concluded he was not the right person. Then Villegas in person assumed responsibility for the narration with his Andean cadence and hisses, which in the end denatured that bold adventure.

  The entire soap opera was recorded with more grief than glory, and it was a brilliant classroom for my insatiable ambitions as a narrator in any genre. I attended the recordings, which were made directly onto the blank disc with a needle like a plow that left tufts of black, luminous, almost invisible filaments, like angel hair. Each night I took home a large handful that I distributed to my friends as an unusual trophy. With untold difficulties and shoddy work, the soap opera was aired at the same time as a colossal party very typical of the promoter.

  No one could invent even a pro forma argument to make me believe that anyone liked it, but it had a good audience and enough of a publicity campaign to save face. It was my good fortune that it infused me with new energy in a genre that seemed to be racing toward unimaginable horizons. My gratitude to and admiration for Don Felix B. Caignet reached the point where I asked him for a private interview some ten years later, when I lived for a few months in Havana as a reporter at the Cuban agency Prensa Latina. But despite all kinds of arguments and pretexts, he never would see me, and all I had from him was a brilliant lesson that I read in one of his interviews: "People always want to cry: the only thing I do is give them an excuse." And Villegas's magic spells produced nothing else. There were complications with Editorial Gonzalez Porto--as there had been earlier with Losada--and there was no way to settle our final accounts because he abandoned his dreams of greatness and returned to his country.

  Alvaro Cepeda Samudio took me out of purgatory with his old idea of transforming El Nacional into the modern newspaper he had learned how to make in the United States. Until then, aside from his occasional contributions to Cronica, which always were literary, he had only had the opportunity to use his degree from Columbia University in the condensed pieces he would send to The Sporting News, in St. Louis, Missouri. At last, in 1953, our friend Julian Davis Echandia, who had been Alvaro's first employer, called to ask him to take charge of the general management of his evening paper, El Nacional. Alvaro himself had disturbed him with the astronomical project he presented to him on his return from New York, but once the mastodon had been captured he called to ask me to help him carry it, with no titles or specified duties, but with an advance on my first paycheck that was enough for me to live on even without collecting my en
tire salary.

  It was a fatal adventure. Alvaro had formulated the entire plan with models from the United States. Davis Echandia was like God on high, a precursor from the heroic days of local sensationalist journalism and the least decipherable man I ever knew, good by birth and more sentimental than compassionate. The rest of the staff were a boisterous crop of great hard-hitting reporters, all of them friends and colleagues of many years' standing. In theory each one had his well-defined orbit, but beyond that no one ever knew who did what, so that the enormous technical mastodon never managed to even take its first step. The few issues that were put out were the result of a heroic act, but no one ever knew whose. When it was time to go to press, the plates were out of order. Urgent material would disappear, and we would go mad with rage. I do not recall the paper ever coming out on time and without corrections, on account of the crouching devils we had in the printing facilities. No one ever knew what happened. The prevailing explanation was perhaps the least perverse: some aging veterans could not tolerate the renovatory regime and conspired with their soulmates until they succeeded in destroying the enterprise.

  Alvaro left, the door slamming behind him. I had a contract that would have been a guarantee under normal conditions, but under the worst it was a straitjacket. Eager to derive some benefit from the time that had been lost, I attempted to assemble as fast as I could type any valid pieces with loose ends that were left over from earlier efforts: fragments of La casa, parodies of the truculent Faulkner of Light in August, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's dead birds raining down, of the detective stories I had grown tired of because they were repetitive, and some bruises I still had left from the trip to Aracataca with my mother. I was letting them flow as they pleased in my sterile office, where nothing was left but the chipped, peeling desk and the typewriter breathing its last, until in one sitting I came to the final title: "One Day After Saturday." One of my few stories that left me satisfied after the first version.

  At El Nacional I was approached by a salesman peddling wristwatches. I had never had one, for obvious reasons at that time, and the one he was offering was showy and expensive. Then the salesman himself confessed that he was a member of the Communist Party whose job was to sell watches as bait for catching contributors.

  "It's like buying the revolution on the installment plan," he said.

  I answered in a good-natured way:

  "The difference is that I get the watch right away but not the revolution."

  The salesman did not take the bad joke very well, and I ended up buying the cheapest watch just to make him happy, with a schedule of payments that he would come by to collect every month. It was the first watch I ever owned, and so accurate and durable that I still keep it as a relic of those days.

  At this time Alvaro Mutis returned with the news of a vast cultural budget from his company and the imminent appearance of the magazine Lampara, its literary publication. When he invited me to contribute I proposed an emergency project: the legend of La Sierpe. I thought that if I wanted to tell it one day, it should not be through any rhetorical prism but recovered from the collective imagination as what it was: a geographical and historical truth. That is--at last--a great feature article.

  "You do whatever you want and however you want to do it," Mutis told me. "But do it, because it has the atmosphere and tone we're looking for in the magazine."

  I promised he would have it in two weeks. Before he left for the airport he called his office in Bogota and ordered payment in advance. The check that came in the mail a week later left me breathless. Even more so when I went to cash it and the bank teller was troubled by my appearance. I was obliged to go to a higher office, where a far too amiable manager asked me where I worked. I answered, as was my habit, that I wrote for El Heraldo, although by then it was no longer true. That was all. The manager examined the check on his desk, observed it with an air of professional suspicion, and at last passed judgment:

  "This is a perfect document."

  That same afternoon, as I was beginning to write "La Sierpe," they told me I had a call from the bank. I began to think that the check was not reliable for any of the countless reasons possible in Colombia. I almost could not swallow the lump in my throat when the bank official, with the dissolute cadence of the Andeans, apologized for not having known at the time that the beggar who cashed the check was the author of "La Jirafa."

  Mutis returned again at the end of the year. He ate little of his lunch as he helped me think of some stable and permanent way to earn more money without wearing myself out. In the end, what seemed best to him was to let the Cano family know I would be available for El Espectador, though the mere idea of returning to Bogota still put my nerves on edge. But Alvaro never let up when it was a matter of helping a friend.

  "Let's do this," he said, "I'm going to send you the fare so you can go whenever you want and however you want, and we'll see what we can come up with."

  It was too much for me to say no, but I was sure that the last plane in my life had been the one that took me out of Bogota after April 9. Besides, the scant rights from the soap opera and the projected publication of the first chapter of "La Sierpe" in the magazine Lampara had gotten me some advertising copy that paid enough for me to send a relief ship to my family in Cartagena. And so once again I resisted the temptation to move to Bogota.

  Alvaro Cepeda, German and Alfonso, and most of my friends from the Japy and the Cafe Roma, spoke to me in good terms about "La Sierpe" when the first chapter was published in Lampara. They agreed that the direct journalistic solution had been the one best suited to a theme that was on the dangerous frontier of what could not be believed. Alfonso, with his half-joking, half-serious style, told me something I never forgot: "The fact is that credibility, my dear Maestro, depends a good deal on the face you put on when you tell the story." I was about to reveal to them Alvaro Mutis's proposals for a job, but I did not dare to, and today I know it was because of my fear that they would approve. He had pressed me again, even after he made a reservation for me on the plane and I canceled it at the last minute. He gave me his word that he was not delivering a message secondhand for El Espectador or any other written or spoken medium. His only purpose--he insisted until the end--was his desire to talk about a series of fixed contributions to the magazine and to examine some technical details regarding the complete series of "La Sierpe," whose second chapter was to appear in the upcoming issue. Alvaro Mutis seemed certain that this kind of reporting could be a good kick at trite costumbrismo on its own terrain. Of all the reasons he had suggested so far, this was the only one that left me thinking.

  One Tuesday filled with melancholy drizzle, I realized I could not go even if I wanted to because the only clothes I had were my dancer's shirts. At six in the evening I did not find anyone in the Libreria Mundo, and I stood waiting in the doorway, with a knot of tears for the melancholy twilight that was beginning to fall. On the sidewalk across the street was a store window with formal clothing that I had never seen although it had always been there, and without thinking about what I was doing I crossed Calle San Blas under the ashes of the rain, and walked with a firm step into the most expensive store in the city. I bought a clerical suit of midnight-blue wool, perfect for the spirit of Bogota at that time, two white shirts with stiff collars, a tie with diagonal stripes, and a pair of shoes of the kind that the actor Jose Mojica made fashionable before he became a saint. The only people whom I told that I was leaving were German, Alvaro, and Alfonso, and they approved the decision as a sensible one as long as I did not come back a Cachaco.

  We celebrated at El Tercer Hombre with the entire group until dawn, as an advance party for my next birthday, for German Vargas, who was the guardian of the saints' calendar, let it be known that on March 6 I would be twenty-seven years old. In the midst of the good wishes of my great friends, I felt ready to devour raw the seventy-three I still had left before I celebrated the first hundred.

  8

  THE PUBLISHER OF El Esp
ectador, Guillermo Cano, called me on the phone when he learned I was in Alvaro Mutis's office, four floors above his in a building that had just opened, about five blocks from his former location. I had arrived the night before and was getting ready to have lunch with a group of Mutis's friends, but Guillermo insisted I stop by first to say hello. I did. After the effusive hugs in the style of the capital of fine speech, and a comment or two on the news of the day, he seized me by the arm and moved me away from his colleagues in the newsroom. "Listen to me for a minute, Gabriel," he said with an innocence that was beyond suspicion, "why don't you do me a huge favor and write just a short editorial that I need before we send the paper to press?" With his thumb and index finger he showed me the size of half a glass of water and concluded:

  "This long."

  More amused than he was, I asked him where I could sit, and he pointed to an empty desk with a typewriter from another day. I sat down with no further questions, thinking about a good subject, and I remained seated there in the same chair, at the same desk, and with the same typewriter for the next eighteen months.

  Minutes after my arrival Eduardo Zalamea Borda, the deputy editor, came out of the next office, absorbed in a bundle of papers. He was startled when he recognized me.

  "Man! Don Gabo!" he almost shouted, using the name he had invented for me in Barranquilla as a shortened form of Gabito, and which only he used. But this time it spread around the newsroom and they continued using it even in print: Gabo.

  I do not remember the subject of the editorial that Guillermo Cano had me write, but since my days at the Universidad Nacional, I had been very familiar with the dynastic style of El Espectador. And in particular the one used in the section "Day by Day" on the editorial page, which enjoyed a well-deserved prestige, and I decided to imitate it with the sangfroid of Luisa Santiaga confronting the demons of adversity. I finished it in half an hour, made some corrections by hand, and turned it in to Guillermo Cano, who stood as he read it over the arc of his glasses for myopia. His concentration seemed to belong not only to him but to an entire dynasty of white-haired forebears, begun by Don Fidel Cano, the founder of the paper in 1887, continued by his son Don Luis, consolidated by his brother Don Gabriel, and taken into his bloodstream when it was already mature by his grandson Guillermo, who had just assumed the general management of the paper at the age of twenty-three. Just as his forebears would have done, he made a few minor revisions and finished with the first practical and simplified use of my new name: