"Very nice, Gabo."
On the night of my return I had realized that Bogota would not be the same for me again as long as my memories survived. Like many great catastrophes in the country, April 9 had produced more forgetting than history. The Hotel Granada had been razed in its centenarian park and the far too new building of the Banco de la Republica was beginning to rise in its place. The old streets from our time did not seem to belong to anyone but the well-lit streetcars, and the corner of the historic crime had lost its grandeur in the spaces vanquished by fires. "Now it really looks like a big city," someone who was with us said in astonishment. And finished breaking my heart with the ritual phrase:
"We have to be grateful for April 9."
On the other hand, I had never been more comfortable than in the nameless pension where Alvaro Mutis had put me. A house beautified by misfortune, on the side of the Parque Nacional, where on the first night I could not endure the envy I felt toward my neighbors in the next room who were making love as if engaged in joyous battle. The next day, when I saw them leave, I could not believe they were the same people: a skinny little girl in a dress from a public orphanage and a very old gentleman with silver hair, who was two meters tall and could have been her grandfather. I thought I had been mistaken, but they themselves made sure to confirm it for me every night thereafter, shouting their deaths until dawn.
El Espectador published my piece in a prominent position on the editorial page. I spent the morning in large stores buying clothing that Mutis imposed on me in the booming English accent he invented to amuse the salesclerks. We had lunch with Gonzalo Mallarino and other young writers who had been invited so that I could be presented to society. I heard nothing further from Guillermo Cano until three days later, when he called while I was in Mutis's office.
"Listen, Gabo, what happened to you?" he said with a poor imitation of the severity of a publisher. "Yesterday we went to press late waiting for your article."
I went down to the newsroom to talk to him, and I still do not know how I continued writing unsigned editorials every afternoon for more than a week without anybody talking to me about a job or a salary. In our conversations during breaks the reporters treated me as if I were one of them, and in fact I was without imagining to what extent.
The section "Day by Day" was never signed, and as a rule Guillermo Cano led off with a political editorial. In an order established by management, next came a piece on any subject by Gonzalo Gonzalez, who also wrote the most intelligent and popular section in the paper--"Questions and Answers"--where he dispensed with readers' doubts under the pseudonym Gog, not on account of Giovanni Papini but because of his own name. After that they published my editorials, and on very rare occasions something special by Eduardo Zalamea, who occupied the best space every day on the editorial page--"The City and the World"--using the pseudonym Ulises, not Homer's--as he would always explain--but James Joyce's.
Alvaro Mutis had to make a business trip to Port-au-Prince early in the new year, and he invited me to go with him. Haiti became the country of my dreams after I read Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World. I still had not given him my answer on February 18, when I wrote a piece about the queen mother of England lost in the solitude of an immense Buckingham Palace. It surprised me that it was published in the lead position of "Day by Day" and had been well received in our offices. That night, at a small gathering at the house of Jose Salgar, the editor-in-chief, Eduardo Zalamea's comments were even more enthusiastic. Some benevolent traitor later told me that this opinion had dissipated any remaining reluctance on the part of management to make me a formal offer of a permanent job.
Very early the next day Alvaro Mutis called me to his office to give me the sad news that the trip to Haiti had been canceled. What he did not tell me was that this had been decided after a casual conversation with Guillermo Cano, who had asked in all sincerity that he not take me to Port-au-Prince. Alvaro, who did not know Haiti either, wanted to know why. "Well, when you see it," Guillermo told him, "you'll understand that it's the place Gabo may like most in the world." And he put the finishing touch on the afternoon with a masterful bullfighter's pass:
"If Gabo goes to Haiti he'll never come back."
Alvaro understood, canceled the trip, and made it seem a decision by his company. And so I never visited Port-au-Prince, but I did not know the real reasons until a few years ago, when Alvaro told them to me in yet another of our endless evocations worthy of grandfathers. Guillermo, for his part, once he had me tied down with a contract at the paper, repeated to me for years that I should think about a great feature article on Haiti, but I never could go and I never told him why.
The thought of being a staff reporter for El Espectador had never crossed my mind. I understood that they would publish my stories because of the scarcity and poor quality of the genre in Colombia, but writing every day for an evening paper was quite a different challenge for someone with little experience in hard-hitting journalism. Half a century old, brought up in a rented house on surplus machines from El Tiempo--a rich, powerful, and influential paper--El Espectador was a modest evening newspaper of sixteen crowded pages, but its five thousand copies, counted in a lax way, were snatched from the newsboys almost at the doors of the printing plant and read in half an hour in the taciturn cafes of the old city. Eduardo Zalamea Borda had stated on the BBC in London that it was the best newspaper in the world. What was most compelling was not the statement itself, but the fact that almost everyone who worked on the paper, and many of those who read it, were convinced that this was true.
I must confess that my heart skipped a beat on the day following the cancellation of the trip to Haiti, when Luis Gabriel Cano, the general manager, made an appointment with me in his office. The interview, with all its formality, lasted less than five minutes. Luis Gabriel had a reputation for being a gruff man, generous as a friend and the kind of miser a good manager should be, but then, and always, he seemed to me very concrete and cordial. His proposal in solemn terms was that I stay on the paper as a staff reporter to write articles on general topics, as well as opinion pieces and whatever else might be needed in the tribulations of the last minute, at a salary of nine hundred pesos a month. I could not breathe. When I recovered I asked him again how much, and he repeated it for me, letter by letter: nine hundred. This made so great an impression on me that some months later, talking about it at a party, my dear Luis Gabriel revealed to me that he had interpreted my surprise as an expression of rejection. Don Gabriel had expressed the final doubt, based on a well-founded fear: "He's so skinny and pale, he might die in the office." This was how I became a staff reporter at El Espectador, where I used the greatest amount of paper in my life in less than two years.
It was a fortunate coincidence. The most frightening institution at the paper was Don Gabriel Cano, the patriarch, who by his own decision established himself as the implacable inquisitor of the newsroom. With his millimetric magnifying glass he would read even the most unexpected comma in the daily edition, mark in red the mistakes in each article, and display on a bulletin board the clippings punished by his devastating comments. The bulletin board was known from the first day as the "Wall of Infamy," and I do not recall a single reporter who escaped his bloodthirsty pen.
The spectacular advancement of Guillermo Cano to publisher of El Espectador at the age of twenty-three did not seem to be the early fruit of his personal merits but the fulfillment of a destiny written before he was born. For that reason my first surprise was learning that he really was the publisher, when many of us on the outside thought he was no more than an obedient son. What struck me most was the speed with which he could recognize what was news.
At times he had to confront everyone, even without many arguments, until he succeeded in convincing them of the truth. It was a time when the profession was not taught at universities but learned on the job, breathing in the printer's ink, and El Espectador had the best teachers, with good hearts but firm hands. Gu
illermo Cano had begun there as soon as he could write, with articles on the bulls so severe and erudite that his principal calling did not seem to be journalism but bullfighting. And so the most difficult experience of his life must have been seeing himself advanced from one day to the next, with no intermediate steps, from beginning student to senior teacher. No one who did not know him well could have imagined the awful determination of his character behind a gentle and somewhat evasive manner. He engaged in vast and dangerous battles with the same passion, not ever stopping when faced with the certainty that behind even the most noble causes death could be lying in ambush.
I have never known anyone more unwilling to engage in public life, more reluctant to accept personal honors, more disdainful of the blandishments of power. He was a man with few friends, but those few were very close, and I felt that I was one of them from the first day. Perhaps the fact that I was one of the youngest in a newsroom of battle-scarred veterans contributed to this, for it created between the two of us a sense of complicity that never weakened. What was exemplary about that friendship was its ability to prevail over opposing opinions. Our political disagreements were very deep and became even deeper as the world around us fell apart, but we always knew how to find a common ground where we could continue fighting together for the causes we thought were just.
The newsroom was enormous, with desks on both sides, and an atmosphere dominated by good humor and crude jokes. There was Dario Bautista, a strange kind of counterminister of finance, who from first cockcrow devoted himself to making the dawn bitter for the highest functionaries, with cabalistic divinations of a sinister future that were almost always correct. There was the legal reporter, Felipe Gonzalez Toledo, a born journalist who often was far ahead of any official investigation in the art of stopping an injustice and solving a crime. Guillermo Lanao, who took care of several ministries, preserved the secret of being a child until his tenderest old age. Rogelio Echaverria, one of the great poets, was responsible for the morning edition and we never saw him in the light of day. My cousin Gonzalo Gonzalez, his leg in a cast because of a soccer injury, had to study in order to answer questions about anything, and in the end he became a specialist in anything. In spite of having been a front-rank soccer player at the university, he had endless faith in theoretical study over and above experience. He gave us a stellar demonstration of this in the reporters' bowling championship, when he devoted himself to studying the physical laws of the game in a manual instead of practicing until dawn at the alleys, like the rest of us, and he was that year's champion.
With a staff like this the newsroom was an eternal entertainment, always subject to the motto of Dario Bautista or Felipe Gonzalez Toledo: "If you lose your temper you're fucking yourself." We all knew everybody else's subjects and helped as much as we could and to the extent that we were asked. Sharing was so great that you could almost say we worked out loud. But when things became difficult you could not hear anyone breathing. From the only desk set on an angle, at the back of the room, Jose Salgar was in command, and he would walk around the room, informing and becoming informed about everything, while he vented his soul's passion with his conjurer's therapy.
I believe that the afternoon when Guillermo Cano took me from desk to desk, walking the length of the room in order to introduce me into society, was the trial by fire for my invincible timidity. I could not speak and my knees were shaking when, without looking at anyone, Dario Bautista bellowed in his fearsome thundering voice:
"The genius has arrived!"
The only thing I could think of was to make a theatrical half-turn with my arm extended toward everyone and say the least witty thing that came from my soul:
"Your humble servant."
I still suffer from the impact of everyone's jeers, but I also feel the consolation of the embraces and kind words with which each of them welcomed me. From then on I was one more member of that community of charitable tigers whose friendship and esprit de corps never weakened. Any information I needed for an article, no matter how small, I would request from the corresponding reporter, who never failed to get it to me on time.
I received my first great lesson as a reporter from Guillermo Cano, and the entire newsroom experienced it one afternoon when a downpour fell on Bogota that kept it in a state of universal flood for three hours on end. The torrent of churning water on the Avenida Jimenez de Quesada swept everything in its path down the slope of the hills and left a wake of catastrophe on the streets. Cars of every description and public transport were paralyzed in the place where the emergency had caught them, and thousands of pedestrians struggled to find shelter in the flooded buildings until there was no room left for more. We reporters, surprised by the disaster at the moment the paper was going to press, contemplated the sad spectacle from the windows, not knowing what to do, standing like punished children with our hands in our pockets. All of a sudden Guillermo Cano seemed to wake from a bottomless sleep, and he turned toward the paralyzed staff and shouted:
"This storm is news!"
It was an unissued order that was obeyed without delay. We ran to our combat posts to obtain by phone the hasty facts indicated by Jose Salgar so that all of us could write in bits and pieces the story of the rainstorm of the century. Ambulances and emergency radio patrol cars were immobilized by vehicles stalled in the middle of the streets. Domestic drains were blocked by the water and the entire corps of firefighters was not enough to conjure away the emergency. Whole neighborhoods had to be evacuated because an urban dam broke. In other districts the sewers erupted. The sidewalks were occupied by ancient invalids, the sick, and asphyxiated children. In the middle of the chaos, five owners of motorboats used for fishing on weekends organized a championship race on the Avenida Caracas, the busiest street in the city. Jose Salgar distributed these facts, which had been collected on the spot, to the reporters, and we elaborated on them for the special edition that was improvised on the fly. The photographers, soaked to the skin through their raincoats, processed their photographs at once. A little before five, Guillermo Cano wrote the masterful synthesis of one of the most dramatic storms in the memory of the city. When the weather cleared at last, the improvised edition of El Espectador circulated as it did every day, no more than an hour late.
My initial relationship with Jose Salgar was the most difficult, but it was always more creative than any other. I believe he had the opposite problem to mine: he was always trying to get his staff reporters to make a supreme effort, while I longed for him to put me on that wavelength. But my other commitments to the paper tied me down, and the only hours I had free were on Sunday. It seems to me that Salgar had his eye on me to be a reporter, while the others had relegated me to films, editorials, and cultural matters because I always had been designated a short-story writer. But my dream was to be a reporter ever since my first steps on the coast, and I knew that Salgar was the best teacher, but he closed doors to me, perhaps in the hope that I would knock them down and force my way in. We worked very well in a cordial and dynamic way, and each time I handed him material written according to Guillermo Cano and even Eduardo Zalamea, he approved it without hesitation but did not forgo the ritual. He made the strenuous gesture of forcing a cork out of a bottle and said with more seriousness than he himself seemed to believe:
"Wring the neck of the swan."*
But he was never aggressive. Just the opposite: a cordial man, forged in fire, who had climbed the ladder of good service, from distributing coffee in the printing plant when he was fourteen to becoming the editor in chief with the greatest professional authority in Colombia. I believe he could not forgive me for wasting my time on lyrical sleight-of-hand in a country where so many hard-hitting reporters were needed. On the other hand, I thought that no journalism was better than feature articles for expressing daily life. But today I know that the obstinacy with which we both tried to do this was the greatest incentive I had for realizing the distant dream of becoming a reporter.
The opportun
ity waylaid me at twenty past eleven on the morning of June 9, 1954, as I was coming back from visiting a friend in the Modelo Prison in Bogota. Army troops armed for war kept a crowd of students at bay on Carrera Septima, two blocks from the corner where Jorge Eliecer Gaitan had been assassinated six years earlier. It was a demonstration protesting the killing of a student the day before by members of the Colombia Battalion who had been trained for the Korean War, and the first street clash between civilians and the government of the Armed Forces. From where I stood you could hear only the shouts of the argument between the students who were trying to proceed to the Palacio Presidencial and the soldiers who were stopping them. In the middle of the crowd we could not understand what they were shouting, but you could sense the tension in the air. Then, with no warning at all, we heard a burst of machine-gun fire followed by two more, one right after the other. Several students and some passersby were killed on the spot. The survivors who tried to take the wounded to the hospital were dissuaded with blows from rifle butts. The troops evacuated the area and closed off the streets. In the stampeding crowd I lived again in a few seconds all the horror of April 9, at the same hour and in the same place.