It was one of the last times I saw Figurita. During Carnival in 1960, disguised as a Cuban tiger, he slipped from the float that was taking him back to his house in Baranoa after the final parade and broke his neck on the pavement covered with debris and trash.
On the second night of my work on the landslides in Medellin, two reporters from El Colombiano--so young they were even younger than me--were waiting at the hotel, determined to interview me about the stories of mine that had been published up to that time. It was hard for them to persuade me, because I had, and still have, a prejudice that may be unfair against interviews understood as a session of questions and answers in which both parties make an effort to maintain a revelatory conversation. I suffered from this prejudice at the two papers where I had worked, and above all at Cronica, where I tried to infect the contributors with my reluctance. But I granted that first interview for El Colombiano, and its sincerity was suicidal.
Today I have been the victim of countless interviews over the course of fifty years and in half the world, and I still have not convinced myself of the efficacy of the genre, either asking the questions or answering them. An immense majority of the ones I have not been able to avoid on any subject ought to be considered as an important part of my works of fiction, because they are no more than that: fantasies about my life. On the other hand, I consider them invaluable, not for publication but as raw material for feature articles, which I value as the stellar genre of the best profession in the world.
In any case, it was not the time for festivals. The government of General Rojas Pinilla, now in open conflict with the press and a large part of public opinion, had ended the month of September with the decision to divide the remote and forgotten department of El Choco among its three prosperous neighbors: Antioquia, Caldas, and Valle. Quibdo, the capital, could be reached from Medellin only on a one-lane road in such bad condition that more than twenty hours were needed to travel one hundred seventy kilometers. The situation is no better today.
In the newsroom of the paper we regarded it as certain that there was not much we could do to stop the dismemberment decreed by a government on bad terms with the Liberal press. Primo Guerrero, El Espectador's veteran correspondent in Quibdo, reported on the third day that a popular demonstration of entire families, including the children, had occupied the main square, determined to stay there day and night until the government abandoned its plan. The first photographs of the rebellious mothers holding their children in their arms were languishing as the days passed because of the ravages of the vigil on a population living outdoors. Every day we reinforced these reports in the newsroom with editorials or statements by Chocoan politicians and intellectuals residing in Bogota, but the government seemed resolved to win through indifference. After several days, however, Jose Salgar approached my desk with his puppeteer's pencil and suggested that I go to investigate what was really happening in El Choco. I tried to resist with the small authority I had gained with my report on Medellin, but it was not enough. Guillermo Cano, who was writing with his back to us, shouted without turning around:
"Go on, Gabo, the women in El Choco are better than the ones you wanted to see in Haiti!"
And so I left without even asking myself how you could write an article on a protest demonstration that rejected violence. I was accompanied by the photographer Guillermo Sanchez, who for months had been pestering me about our doing war stories together. Tired of hearing him, I had shouted at him:
"What war, damn it!"
"Don't be a damn fool, Gabo," he delivered the truth with a single stroke, "I always hear you saying that this country has been at war since Independence."
At dawn on Tuesday, September 21, he appeared in the newsroom ready to cover a muzzled war, dressed more like a guerrilla fighter than a photojournalist, with cameras and bags hanging all over his body. The first surprise before you even left Bogota was that you went to El Choco from a secondary airport without services of any kind, surrounded by the wreckage of dead trucks and rusted airplanes. Ours, still alive through the arts of magic, was one of the legendary Catalinas from the Second World War operated as a cargo plane by a civilian company. It had no seats. The interior was unadorned and gloomy, with small clouded windows and a cargo of bales of fibers for making brooms. We were the only passengers. The copilot in shirtsleeves, young and good-looking like the aviators in movies, told us to sit on the bales because they seemed more comfortable. He did not recognize me, but I knew he had been a notable baseball player in the La Matuna leagues in Cartagena.
The takeoff was terrifying, even for a passenger as experienced as Guillermo Sanchez, because of the thundering roar of the engines and the scrap-metal clanging of the fuselage, but once stabilized in the translucent sky of the savanna, the plane glided along with the courage of a war veteran. But past Medellin we were surprised by a diluvian rainstorm over a tangled forest between two cordilleras, and we had to fly right into it. Then we experienced something that perhaps very few mortals have experienced: it rained into the airplane through the leaks in the fuselage. Our friend the copilot, leaping over bales of brooms, brought us the day's papers to use as umbrellas. I covered even my face with mine, not so much to protect myself from the rain as to keep the others from seeing me weep with terror.
After two hours of luck and chance, the plane leaned to its left, descended in attack position over a dense forest, and gave two exploratory turns above the main square of Quibdo. Guillermo Sanchez, prepared to capture from the air the protest exhausted by its erosive vigils, found nothing but the empty square. The dilapidated amphibian gave one last turn to confirm that there were no obstacles living or dead in the peaceful Atrato River, and completed its felicitous landing on water in the suffocating heat of midday.
The church patched with boards, the cement benches plastered by birds, and an ownerless mule crunching on the branches of a gigantic tree were the only signs of human existence in the dusty, solitary square that looked like nothing so much as an African capital. Our original intention had been to take urgent photographs of the crowd standing in protest and send them to Bogota on the return plane, while we obtained enough firsthand information for tomorrow's edition, which we could send by telegraph. None of that was possible, because nothing had happened.
There were no witnesses as we walked the very long street parallel to the river, lined with shops that were closed for lunch and residences with wooden balconies and rusted roofs. It was the perfect stage but there was no play. Our good colleague Primo Guerrero, correspondent for El Espectador, was taking a siesta without a care in the world in a springlike hammock under the arbor in his house, as if the silence that surrounded him was the peace of the grave. The frankness with which he explained his indolence could not have been more objective. After the demonstrations of the first few days, the tension had eased for lack of topics. Then a mobilization of the entire town was organized with theatrical techniques, some pictures were taken that were not published because they were not very credible, and patriotic speeches were given that in fact had shaken the country, but the government remained imperturbable. Primo Guerrero, with an ethical flexibility that perhaps even God has forgiven him for, kept the protest alive in the press by dint of telegrams.
Our professional problem was simple: we had not undertaken that Tarzanic expedition in order to report that the news did not exist. On the other hand, we had access to the means to make it true and achieve its purpose. Primo Guerrero proposed organizing the portable demonstration one more time, and nobody could think of a better idea. Our most enthusiastic collaborator was Captain Luis A. Cano, the new governor appointed after the angry resignation of the previous one, and he had the fortitude to delay the plane so that the paper would receive Guillermo Sanchez's red-hot photographs in time. That was how the news item invented by necessity became the only one that was true, magnified by the press and radio throughout the country and caught on the fly by the military government in order to save face. That same night a g
eneral mobilization of Chocoan politicians began--some of them very influential in certain sectors of the country--and two days later General Rojas Pinilla declared the cancellation of his own decision to distribute pieces of El Choco to its neighbors.
Guillermo Sanchez and I did not return to Bogota right away because we persuaded the paper to allow us to travel through the interior of El Choco in order to gain profound knowledge of the reality of that fantastic world. After ten days of silence, when we walked into the newsroom tanned by the sun and dropping with fatigue, Jose Salgar received us, happy but with his usual firmness of character.
"Do you know," he asked us with his unconquerable certainty, "how long the news about El Choco has been over?"
The question confronted me for the first time with the mortal condition of journalism. No one, in fact, had taken interest again in El Choco once the presidential decision not to dismember it had been published. But Jose Salgar supported me in the risky undertaking of cooking up what I could out of that dead fish.
What we tried to convey in four long installments was the discovery inside Colombia of another inconceivable country that we had not been aware of. A magical homeland of flowering jungles and eternal downpours, where everything seemed like an unimaginable version of ordinary life. The great difficulty in constructing overland routes was the enormous number of indomitable rivers, but there was no more than one bridge in the entire territory. We found a highway seventy-five kilometers long through the virgin forest, built at enormous cost to connect the towns of Itsmina and Yuto, though it did not pass through either one: an act of retaliation by the builder because of his disputes with the two mayors.
In one of the villages in the interior the postal agent asked us to take six months' worth of mail to his colleague in Itsmina. A pack of domestic cigarettes cost thirty centavos there, as it did in the rest of the country, but when the small weekly supply plane was late the cigarettes increased in price for each day of delay, until the inhabitants found themselves forced to smoke foreign cigarettes that ended up cheaper than domestic ones. A sack of rice cost fifteen pesos more than at the site of cultivation because it was carried through eighty kilometers of virgin jungle on the backs of mules that clung like cats to the mountainsides. The women in the poorest towns panned for gold and platinum in the rivers while the men fished, and on Saturdays they would sell commercial travelers a dozen fish and four grams of platinum for only three pesos.
All this took place in a society famous for its desire to study. But schools were few and far between, and students had to travel several leagues every day, on foot and by canoe, to get to school and come home again. Some were so crowded that the same school was used Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for boys, and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for girls. Circumstances made them the most democratic in the country, because the child of the laundress who did not have enough to eat attended the same school as the child of the mayor.
Very few Colombians at the time knew that in the very heart of the Chocoan jungle was one of the most modern cities in the country. Its name was Andagoya, located at the juncture of the San Juan and Condoto Rivers, and it had a perfect telephone system, and docks for the boats and launches that belonged to the city of beautiful tree-lined avenues. The small, clean houses, with large fenced-in spaces and picturesque wooden steps at the door, seemed planted on the lawns. In the center was a casino with a cabaret-restaurant and a bar where imported liquors cost less than in the rest of the country. It was a city inhabited by men from all over the world who had forgotten nostalgia and lived there better than in their own lands under the all-embracing authority of the local manager of the Choco Pacifico. For Andagoya, in real life, was a foreign nation of private property, whose dredgers plundered gold and platinum from prehistoric rivers and carried them away in its own boats that went out into the world under no one's control through the mouths of the San Juan River.
This was the Choco that we wanted to reveal to Colombians, but with no result at all, because once the news was over everything fell back into place and it continued to be the most forgotten region in the country. I believe that the reason is evident: Colombia had always been a country with a Caribbean identity that opened to the world by means of the umbilical cord of Panama. Its forced amputation condemned us to be what we are today: a nation with an Andean mentality whose circumstances favor the canal between two oceans belonging not to us but to the United States.
The rhythm of the newsroom every week would have been fatal if not for Friday afternoons, when we freed ourselves from work and congregated in the bar of the Hotel Continental across the street for some relaxation that tended to last until dawn. Eduardo Zalamea baptized those nights with a name of his own invention: "cultural Fridays." It was my only opportunity to converse with him so I would not miss hearing about the new books in the world, which he kept up with in his capacity as an extraordinary reader. The survivors in those tertulias filled with infinite drinks and unforeseeable conclusions--other than two or three eternal friends of Ulises--were those of us reporters who were not afraid to wring the neck of the swan until daybreak.
It had always surprised me that Zalamea never made any observation regarding my editorials, although many of them were inspired by his. But when the "cultural Fridays" were established, he gave free rein to his ideas on the genre. He confessed that he disagreed with the judgments in many of my pieces and would suggest others to me, not in the tone of superior to disciple but as writer to writer.
Another frequent refuge after functions at the Cinema Club were the midnight gatherings in the apartment of Luis Vicens and his wife, Nancy, a few blocks from El Espectador. He had been a collaborator of Marcel Colin Reval, editor-in-chief of the magazine Cinematographie francaise in Paris, who had traded his cinematic dreams for the good occupation of bookseller in Colombia on account of the wars in Europe. Nancy behaved as a magical host who could enlarge a dining room that sat four into one for twelve. They had met at a family dinner soon after he arrived in Bogota in 1937. The only place left at the table was next to Nancy, who was horrified when she saw the last guest come in, with his white hair and the skin of a mountain climber burned by the sun. "What bad luck!" she said to herself. "I'll have to sit next to this Pole who probably doesn't even know Spanish." She was almost correct about the language, because the new arrival spoke Castilian in a raw Catalan crossed with French, and she was from Boyaca, with a short temper and a freewheeling tongue. But they got on so well after their initial greeting that they agreed to live together forever.
Their gatherings were improvised, after the great showings of films, in an apartment crowded with a mixture of all the arts, where there was no room for another painting by the young artists of Colombia, some of whom would become famous in the world. Their guests were selected from the best in arts and letters, and members of the group in Barranquilla would show up from time to time. I was made right at home after the appearance of my first movie review, and when I left the paper before midnight I would walk three blocks and oblige them to stay up all night. Maestra Nancy, who in addition to being a sublime cook was also a pitiless matchmaker, would improvise innocent suppers to connect me with the most attractive and liberated girls in the artistic world, and she never forgave my twenty-eight years when I told her that my true vocation was not to be a writer or a journalist but an invincible bachelor.
Alvaro Mutis, in the intervals he had free between his trips around the world, completed in more lofty style my admission into the cultural community. In his capacity as head of public relations for Esso Colombiana, he organized lunches in the most expensive restaurants with people who in reality were valuable and influential in arts and letters, and he often had guests from other cities in the country. The poet Jorge Gaitan Duran, obsessed with creating a great literary magazine that cost a fortune, solved the problem in part with funds from Alvaro Mutis for the promotion of culture. Alvaro Castano Castillo and his wife, Gloria Valencia, had been trying for years to
found a radio station devoted in its entirety to keeping good music and cultural programs within reach. We all kidded them on account of the unreality of their project, except Alvaro Mutis, who did all he could to help them. And so they established the station HJCK, "The world in Bogota," with a transmitter of five hundred watts, the minimum at the time. Television did not yet exist in Colombia, but Gloria Valencia invented the metaphysical wonder of broadcasting a fashion show on the radio.
The only repose I permitted myself in those heady times were slow Sunday afternoons in the house of Alvaro Mutis, who taught me to listen to music without prejudices of class. We would lie on the rug listening with our hearts, and with no learned speculations, to the great masters. It was the origin of a passion that had begun in the obscure little room at the Biblioteca Nacional and never forgot us again. Today I have listened to as much music as I have been able to obtain, above all romantic chamber music, which I consider the pinnacle of all arts. In Mexico, while I was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude--between 1965 and 1966--I had only two records, which wore out because they were played so often: the Preludes of Debussy and the Beatles' Hard Day's Night. Later, in Barcelona, when at last I had almost as many as I had always wanted, alphabetical classification seemed too conventional, and I adopted for my own convenience an instrumental order: the cello, which is my favorite, from Vivaldi to Brahms; the violin, from Corelli to Schoenberg; the clavichord and the piano, from Bach to Bartok. Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.