I almost raced the three steep blocks to the building of El Espectador and found the newsroom cleared for action. With a knot in my throat I recounted what I had been able to see at the site of the massacre, but someone who knew even less was already writing at top speed the first article about the identity of the nine dead students and the condition of the wounded in the hospitals. I was sure they would order me to recount the outrage because I was the only one who had seen it, but Guillermo Cano and Jose Salgar had already agreed that it ought to be a collective report in which each person would contribute something. The reporter in charge, Felipe Gonzalez Toledo, would give it its final unity.
"Take it easy," said Felipe, concerned about my disappointment. "People know that everybody here works on everything even if it's unsigned."
For his part, Ulises consoled me with the idea that the editorial I had to write could be the most important element because it would deal with a very serious problem of public order. He was right, but it was so delicate a piece, and so compromising to the paper's politics, that it was written by several hands at the highest levels. I believe it was an important lesson for everyone, but to me it seemed disheartening. That was the end of the honeymoon between the government of the Armed Forces and the Liberal press. It had begun a year earlier with General Rojas Pinilla's assumption of power, which allowed the country a sigh of relief after the bloodbath of two successive Conservative governments, and it lasted until that day. For me it was also a trial by fire in my dream of being an ordinary reporter.
A short while later a photograph was published of the body of an unclaimed child whom they had not been able to identify in the amphitheater of Forensic Medicine, and to me it looked the same as one published a few days earlier of another child who had disappeared. I showed them to the head of the judicial section, Felipe Gonzalez Toledo, and he called the mother of the first boy, who still had not been found. It was a lesson for the rest of my life. The mother of the child who had disappeared was waiting for Felipe and me in the vestibule of the amphitheater. She seemed so poor and diminished that I made a supreme effort, wishing with all my heart that the corpse was not her son. In the long glacial basement, under intense lighting, there were some twenty tables arranged in a row with bodies like stone burial mounds under dull sheets. The three of us followed the solemn guard to the next-to-the-last table in the rear. Under the bottom edge of the sheet the soles of some sad little boots could be seen, the heels very worn down by use. The woman recognized them, turned livid, but controlled herself with her last breath until the guard removed the sheet with a bullfighter's flourish. It was the body of a boy about nine years old, his eyes open and astonished, and wearing the same wretched clothes in which he had been found, dead for several days, in a ditch beside the road. The mother let out a howl and fell to the floor, screaming. Felipe picked her up and calmed her with murmurs of consolation, while I asked myself if that ought to be the profession I dreamed about. Eduardo Zalamea confirmed for me that it was not. He also thought that crime reporting, so well established among readers, was a difficult specialization that required a certain kind of character and an impregnable heart. I never attempted it again.
A very different kind of reality forced me to be a movie critic. It had never occurred to me that I could be one, but in Don Antonio Daconte's Olympia Theater in Aracataca, and then in the traveling school of Alvaro Cepeda, I had glimpsed the basic elements for writing a guide to films using a more helpful criterion than the one known until then in Colombia. Ernesto Volkening, a great German writer and literary critic who had lived in Bogota since the war, broadcast a commentary on new films on Radio Nacional, but it was limited to an audience of specialists. There were other excellent but occasional commentators associated with the Catalan bookseller Luis Vicens, a resident of Bogota since the Spanish Civil War. It was he who founded the first cinema club with the painter Enrique Grau, the critic Hernando Salcedo, and the hard work of the journalist Gloria Valencia de Castano Castillo, who had first-class credentials. There was an immense public in the country for big action movies and tearful melodramas, but good cinema was limited to well-educated aficionados, and exhibitors were willing to risk less and less on films that ran for three days on posters. Finding a new public in that faceless crowd required a difficult but possible pedagogy that would foster an audience open to good films and help exhibitors who wanted to show them but could not finance them. The greatest difficulty was that exhibitors could hold over the press the threat of canceling movie advertisements--which provided substantial income to the papers--in reprisal for negative reviews. El Espectador was the first to face the risk, and I was assigned the task of commenting on the movie openings of the week, more as an elementary primer for fans than as pontificating criticism. One precaution taken by common consent was that I would always carry my complimentary pass intact as proof that I had bought my ticket at the box office.
The first reviews soothed the exhibitors because they were about films in a good sampling of foreign cinema. Among them, Puccini, an extensive recapitulation of the life of the great musician; So This Is Love, which was the well-told story of the singer Grace Moore; and La Fete a Henriette, a peaceable comedy by Julien Duvivier. The owners we met as we left the theater indicated their satisfaction with our critical comments. Alvaro Cepeda, on the other hand, woke me at six in the morning with a call from Barranquilla when he learned of my audacity.
"How could you even think of being a movie critic without my permission, damn it!" he shouted into the telephone, convulsed with laughter. "You're an imbecile about films!"
He became my constant assistant, of course, though he never agreed with the idea that it was not a question of teaching but of orienting an elementary public without academic training. And the honeymoon with the owners was not as sweet as we thought at the beginning. When we faced commercial cinema pure and simple, even the most understanding complained of the harshness of our comments. Eduardo Zalamea and Guillermo Cano were able to deflect them on the phone until the end of April, when an exhibitor who presumed to be a leader accused us in an open letter of intimidating the public in order to prejudice his interests. It seemed to me that the heart of the problem was that the author of the letter did not know the meaning of the word intimidate, but I felt on the verge of defeat because I did not believe it possible that in the paper's crisis of expansion, Don Gabriel Cano would renounce movie advertisements for the sake of pure esthetic pleasure. On the day he received the letter, he summoned his sons and Ulises to an urgent meeting, and I considered it a given that the section would be dead and buried. But as he passed my desk after the meeting, Don Gabriel said to me without specifying the subject and with a grandfather's mischievousness:
"Don't worry, my little namesake."
The next day the response to the producer appeared in "Day by Day," written by Guillermo Cano in a deliberate academic style, and its conclusion said it all: "The public is not intimidated and certainly no one's interests are prejudiced if the press publishes serious and responsible cinematic criticism, which resembles that of other countries and breaks the old and prejudicial patterns of immoderate praise for what is good as well as what is bad." It was not the only letter or our only response. Functionaries from the movie theaters attacked with bitter complaints, and we received contradictory letters from confused readers. But it was all in vain: the column survived until movie criticism stopped being occasional in the country and became routine in the press and on the radio.
After that, in a little less than two years, I published seventy-five critical reviews, to which should be added the hours spent seeing the films. In addition to some six hundred editorials, a signed or unsigned article every three days, and at least eighty feature articles, some signed, some anonymous. My literary contributions were published in the Magazine Dominical of the same paper, including several stories and the complete series on "La Sierpe," which had been interrupted in the magazine Lampara because of internal disagreements.
It was the first prosperity in my life, but I had no time to enjoy it. The apartment that I rented furnished, with laundry service, was no more than a bedroom with a bath, telephone, breakfast in bed, and a large window looking out on the eternal drizzle of the saddest city in the world. I used it only for sleeping from three in the morning, after I had read for an hour, until the morning newscasts on the radio would orient me to the actuality of the new day.
I did not stop thinking with a certain disquiet that it was the first time I had my own fixed place to live but had no time even to think about it. I was so busy dealing with my new life that my only notable expense was the lifeboat I sent without fail at the end of the month to my family. I realize only today that I almost had no time to think about my private life. Perhaps because there survived inside me the idea of Caribbean mothers that women from Bogota gave themselves without love to men from the coast only to fulfill their dream of living by the ocean. But in my first bachelor apartment in Bogota, I accomplished this without risk when I asked the porter if visits from female friends at midnight were permitted, and he gave me this wise reply:
"It's prohibited, Senor, but I don't see what I shouldn't."
At the end of July, without prior warning, Jose Salgar stopped in front of my desk as I was writing an editorial and looked at me in a long silence. I stopped in the middle of a sentence and said to him, intrigued:
"What's going on!"
He did not even blink, playing an invisible bolero with his red pencil, wearing a diabolical smile whose purpose was far too noticeable. He explained without being asked that he had not authorized me to write the article on the massacre of the students on Carrera Septima because it was a difficult assignment for a beginner. On the other hand, he would offer me, on his own responsibility, the reporter's diploma, in a direct way but without the slightest spirit of a challenge, if I was capable of accepting a mortal proposition from him:
"Why don't you go to Medellin and tell us what the hell it was that happened there?"
It was not easy to understand, because he was talking about something that had occurred more than two weeks earlier, which allowed the suspicion that the news was stale beyond recovery. It was known that on the morning of July 12 there had been a landslide in La Media Luna, a steep, craggy place in the east of Medellin, but the outrage in the press, the disorder among the authorities, and the panic of those injured had caused administrative and humanitarian confusions that obscured the reality. Salgar did not ask me to try to establish as far as possible what had happened, he ordered me flat out to reconstruct the whole truth and nothing but the truth on the site, and in a minimum amount of time. But something in the way he said it made me think that at last he had loosened the rein.
Until then the only thing everyone knew about Medellin was that Carlos Gardel had died there, burned to a crisp in an aerial catastrophe. I knew it was a land of great writers and poets, and that the Colegio de la Presentacion, where Mercedes Barcha had begun to study that year, was located there. Faced with so delirious a mission, it no longer seemed unattainable to reconstruct, piece by piece, the calamity of a mountain. And so I landed in Medellin at eleven in the morning, in a rainstorm so frightening I deceived myself into thinking I would be the final victim of the landslide.
I left my suitcase in the Hotel Nutibara, with clothing for two days and an emergency tie, and went out to the street in an idyllic city still clouded over with the remnants of the storm. Alvaro Mutis had made the trip to help me endure my fear of planes, and he put me on the track of well-placed people in the life of the city. But the chilling truth was that I did not have the slightest idea of where to begin. I wandered streets radiant under the golden dust of a splendid sun following the storm, and after an hour I had to take shelter in the first store I came to because it started raining again while the sun was shining. Then I began to feel the first flutterings of panic in my chest. I tried to repress them with my grandfather's magic formula in the middle of combat, but in the end my fear of fear overcame my morale. I realized I would never be able to do what I had been assigned to do, and I had not had the courage to say so. Then I understood that the only sensible thing would be to write a letter of thanks to Guillermo Cano and go back to Barranquilla and the state of grace in which I had found myself six months earlier.
With the immense relief of having come out of hell, I took a taxi to go back to the hotel. The midday newscaster made a long commentary at the top of his voice, as if the landslides had happened yesterday. The driver almost shouted as he gave vent to his feelings about the negligence of the government and the poor handling of relief for the injured, and somehow I felt responsible for his righteous anger. But then it cleared again, and the air became diaphanous and fragrant because of the explosion of flowers in Parque Berrio. All of a sudden, I do not know why, I felt the onset of madness.
"Let's do this," I said to the driver. "Before we go to the hotel, take me to the place where the landslides happened."
"But there's nothing to see there," he said. "Just lit candles and little crosses for the dead they haven't been able to get out."
This was how I learned that victims as well as survivors came from different parts of the city, and the survivors had walked across town en masse to recover the bodies of those killed in the first slide. The great tragedy occurred when curious onlookers overran the site, and another part of the mountain slid down in a devastating avalanche. So that the only people who could tell the story were the few who had escaped successive slides and were alive at the other end of the city.
"I understand," I told the driver, trying to control the tremor in my voice. "Take me to where the living are."
He made a U-turn in the middle of the street and raced off in the opposite direction. His silence must have been the result not only of his current speed but also his hope of convincing me with his explanations.
The thread of the story began with two boys, eight and eleven years old, who had left their house to cut wood on Tuesday, July 12, at seven in the morning. They had gone about a hundred meters when they heard the crash of the avalanche of earth and rocks rushing toward them down the side of the hill. They just managed to escape. Their three younger sisters were trapped in the house along with their mother and their newborn baby brother. The only survivors in the family were the two boys who had just gone out, and the father, who had left early for his work as a sand vendor ten kilometers from the house.
The place was an inhospitable wasteland along the highway from Medellin to Rionegro, which at eight in the morning had no inhabitants to become further victims. The radio stations had broadcast the exaggerated news item with so many bloody details and urgent appeals that the first volunteers arrived before the firefighters. At noon two more victimless slides had taken place, which increased the general anxiety, and a local radio station set itself up for direct transmission from the site where the disaster had occurred. At that time almost all the inhabitants of nearby towns and neighborhoods were there, in addition to the curious from all over the city drawn by the appeals on the radio, and the passengers who got off intercity buses more to interfere than to help. In addition to the few bodies from the morning, there were another three hundred in the successive slides. But late in the afternoon, more than two thousand unprepared volunteers were still offering confused assistance to the survivors. By sunset there was almost no room to breathe. The crowd was dense and chaotic at six o'clock, when another devastating avalanche of six hundred thousand cubic meters came down with a colossal din, causing as many victims as if it had happened in Parque Berrio in Medellin. A catastrophe so rapid that Dr. Javier Mora, the city's secretary of public works, found in the rubble the body of a rabbit that did not have time to escape.
Two weeks later, when I visited the site, only seventy-four corpses had been recovered, and numerous survivors were out of danger. Most were victims not of the slides but of imprudence and unruly solidarity. As happens in earthquakes, it was not possib
le to calculate the number of people with problems who took advantage of the opportunity to disappear without a trace in order to escape their debts or change their wife. But good fortune also had a part to play, because a subsequent investigation showed that after the first day, while recoveries were still being attempted, a mass of rock capable of generating an avalanche of fifty thousand cubic meters had been about to dislodge. More than fifteen days later, with the help of survivors who now were calm, I was able to reconstruct the story, which would not have been possible at the moment it happened because of the awkwardness and unwieldiness of reality.
My job was reduced to rescuing the truth that had been lost in a tangle of contrary suppositions and reconstructing the human drama in the order in which it had occurred, and apart from all political and sentimental calculation. Alvaro Mutis had set me on the right track when he sent me to the publicist Cecilia Warren, who organized the data I brought back from the site of the disaster. The feature article was published in three parts, and it at least had the merit of awakening interest in a forgotten news item two weeks after the event and bringing order to the chaos of the tragedy.
But my best memory of those days is not what I did but what I almost did thanks to the delirious imagination of my old pal from Barranquilla, Orlando Rivera (Figurita), whom I happened to run into on one of my few breaks from the investigation. He had been living in Medellin for the past few months, and was the happy new husband of Sol Santamaria, a charming, free-spirited nun whom he had helped to leave a cloistered convent after seven years of poverty, obedience, and chastity. During one of our memorable drinking bouts, Figurita revealed that he had prepared, with his wife and on his own account, a masterful plan to get Mercedes Barcha out of her boarding school. A priest who was a friend of his, and famous for his arts as a matchmaker, would be ready at any hour to marry us. The only condition, of course, was that Mercedes agree, but we found no way to talk it over with her inside the four walls of her captivity. Today more than ever I feel fierce regret at not having the temerity to live that newspaper-serial drama. Mercedes, for her part, did not learn of the plan until more than fifty years later, when she read about it in the rough draft of this book.