During that vacation my father had the strange idea of preparing me for business. “Just in case,” he told me. The first thing was to teach me how to collect pharmacy bills at people’s houses. One day he sent me to collect several at La Hora, a brothel without prejudices on the outskirts of town.
I went up to the half-closed door of a room that opened onto the street, and I saw one of the women from the house, barefoot and wearing a slip that did not cover her thighs, taking a nap on an air mattress. Before I could speak to her she sat up on the mattress, looked at me half asleep, and asked me what I wanted. I told her I had a message from my father for Don Eligio Molina, the proprietor. But instead of giving me directions she told me to come in and bar the door, and with an index finger that said everything she signaled to me:
“Come here.”
I went there, and as I approached, her heavy breathing filled the room like a river in flood, until she grasped my arm with her right hand and slipped her left inside my fly. I felt a delicious terror.
“So you’re the son of the doctor with the little drops,” she said as she handled me inside my trousers with five agile fingers that felt like ten. She took off my trousers and did not stop whispering warm words in my ear as she pulled her slip over her head and lay faceup on the bed wearing only her red-flowered panties. “This is something you have to take off,” she told me. “It’s your duty as a man.”
I pulled down the zipper but in my haste I could not remove her panties, and she had to help me by extending her legs and making a swimmer’s rapid movement. Then she lifted me by my armpits and put me on top of her in the academic missionary position. The rest she did on her own, until I died alone on top of her, splashing in the onion soup of her filly’s thighs.
She lay in silence, on her side, staring into my eyes, and I looked back at her with the hope of beginning again, this time without fear and with more time. All of a sudden she said she would not charge me the fee of two pesos for her services because I had not come prepared. Then she lay on her back and scrutinized my face.
“Besides,” she said, “you’re Luis Enrique’s big brother, aren’t you? You both have the same voice.”
I was innocent enough to ask her how she knew him.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she said with a laugh. “I even have a pair of his shorts here that I had to wash for him the last time.”
It seemed an exaggeration considering my brother’s age, but when she showed them to me I realized it was true. Then she jumped out of bed naked, with a balletic grace, and as she dressed she explained that Don Eligio Molina’s was the next door in the building, on the left. At last she asked:
“It’s your first time, isn’t it?”
My heart skipped a beat.
“What do you mean?” I lied, “I’ve done it at least seven times.”
“Anyway,” she said with an ironic expression, “you ought to tell your brother to teach you a couple of things.”
My initiation triggered a vital force in me. Vacation lasted from December to February, and I wondered how many times I would be able to get two pesos so I could go back to her. My brother Luis Enrique, already a veteran of the body, burst his sides laughing at the idea that someone our age would have to pay for something that two people did at the same time and that made them both happy.
Within the feudal spirit of La Mojana, the lords of the land enjoyed initiating the virgins from among their vassals, and after a few nights of abuse they would leave them to their fates. There were plenty to choose from when the girls came out to hunt on the square after dances. On that vacation, however, they filled me with the same fear as the telephone, and I watched them pass by like clouds in the water. I did not have an instant of tranquility because of the desolation my first casual adventure had left in my body. Even today I do not think it is exaggerated to believe it was the cause of my surly state of mind when I returned to the colegio bedazzled through and through by an inspired piece of nonsense by the Bogotán poet Don José Manuel Marroquín, which drove listeners mad beginning with the first stanza:
Now that barks dog, now that crows cock,
now that dawning sounds the high rings bell;
and the brays burro and the warbles bird,
and the whistles watchmen and the grunts swine,
and the dawny rose fields the broad gilds,
pearling liquids poury as I tear sheds
and colding with shiver though the burn souls,
I come to sigh my heaves window your beneaths.
I not only introduced disorder wherever I went reciting the interminable lines of the poem, but I learned to speak the language with the fluency of a native from who knows where. It happened with some frequency: I would give an answer to any question, but almost always it was so strange or amusing that the teachers would retreat. Someone must have worried about my mental health when I gave him a correct but at first hearing indecipherable answer on an exam. I do not remember there being any bad faith in these easy jokes that made everyone laugh.
I was surprised that the priests talked to me as if they had lost their minds, and I followed their lead. Another reason for alarm was that I invented parodies of sacred chorales with pagan words that, to my good fortune, no one understood. My counselor, with my parents’ permission, took me to a specialist who gave me a thorough but very amusing examination, because in addition to his mental quickness he had an irresistible personal sympathy and methodology. He had me read a card of nonsensical sentences that I had to put in proper order. I did this with so much enthusiasm that the doctor could not resist the temptation of becoming involved in my game, and we thought up such ingenious tests that he took notes in order to incorporate them into future examinations. At the end of a detailed interrogation regarding my habits, he asked how often I masturbated. I answered the first thing that occurred to me: I never had dared to do it. He did not believe me but remarked in an offhand way that fear was a negative factor in sexual health, and his very incredulity seemed more like an incitement to me. I thought he was a splendid man, whom I tried to see as an adult when I was a reporter on El Heraldo, so that he could tell me the private conclusions he had drawn from my examination, and the only thing I learned was that he had moved to the United States years before. One of his old friends was more explicit and told me with great affection that there was nothing strange about his being in a mental hospital in Chicago, because he always thought he was in worse shape than his patients.
His diagnosis was nervous fatigue aggravated by reading after meals. He recommended absolute rest for two hours during digestion, and physical activity more demanding than the required sports. I am still surprised by the seriousness with which my parents and teachers took his orders. They regulated my reading and more than once took away the books they found me reading in class under the desk. They excused me from difficult subjects and obliged me to have more physical activity for several hours a day. And so while the others were in class, I played alone on the basketball court making simpleminded baskets and reciting from memory. My classmates were divided from the beginning: those who in reality thought I always had been crazy, those who believed I played at being crazy in order to enjoy life, and those whose dealings with me continued to be based on the assumption that the crazy people were the teachers. This is the period that gave rise to the story that I was expelled from school because I threw an inkwell at the arithmetic teacher as he was writing exercises on the rule of three on the blackboard. It was fortunate that Papá understood this in a simple manner and decided I should return home without finishing the year or wasting any more of his time and money on an ailment that might only be a liver complaint.
For my brother Abelardo, on the other hand, there were no problems in life that could not be resolved in bed. While my sisters treated me with compassion, he told me the magic prescription as soon as he saw me come into his shop:
“What you need is a good woman.”
He was so serious about this that
almost every day he would go to the billiard parlor on the corner for half an hour, leaving me behind the partition in the tailor shop with girlfriends of his of every stripe, and never with the same one. It was a period of creative excess that seemed to confirm Abelardo’s clinical diagnosis, because the next year I went back to school in my right mind.
I never forgot the joy with which they welcomed me back at the Colegio San José, and the admiration with which they celebrated my father’s little drops. This time I did not go to live with the Valdeblánquez family, who no longer had room in the house because of the birth of their second child, but went instead to the house of Don Eliécer García, a brother of my paternal grandmother who was famous for his kindness and integrity. He worked in a bank until his retirement, and what touched me most was his eternal passion for the English language. He studied it throughout his life, beginning at dawn and then very late at night, singing the exercises in a very good voice and with a good accent for as long as his age permitted. On holidays he would go to the port and hunt for tourists to talk to, and he came to have as good a command of English as he always had of Castilian, but his shyness prevented him from speaking it to anyone he knew. His three sons, all older than I, and his daughter Valentina, never could hear him.
Through Valentina—my close friend and an inspired reader—I discovered the existence of the Arena y Cielo, the Sand and Sky movement, formed by a group of young poets who had proposed renovating the poetry of the Caribbean coast following the good example of Pablo Neruda. In reality they were a local replica of the Piedra y Cielo, Stone and Sky, a group that reigned during those years in the poets’ cafés in Bogotá and in the literary supplements edited by Eduardo Carranza in the shadow of the Spaniard Juan Ramón Jiménez, with the salutary determination to clear away the dead leaves of the nineteenth century. They were no more than half a dozen people just out of adolescence, but they had burst into the literary supplements along the coast with so much force that they were beginning to be seen as a great artistic promise.
The captain of Sand and Sky, named César Augusto del Valle, was about twenty-two years old and had brought his renovating impulse not only to the subjects and sentiments but also to the orthography and grammatical rules of his poems. To purists he seemed a heretic, to academics he seemed an imbecile, and to classicists he seemed a madman. The truth, however, was that in spite of his contagious militancy—like Neruda—he was an incorrigible romantic.
One Sunday my cousin Valentina took me to the house where César lived with his parents, in the San Roque district, the most boisterous in the city. He was big-boned, dark, and skinny, and had large rabbit teeth and the disheveled hair of the poets of his day. Above all, he was a roisterer and a womanizer. His house was lower middle class and lined with books, without room for one more. His father was a serious, somewhat melancholy man, who had the air of a retired functionary and seemed distressed by his son’s sterile vocation. His mother welcomed me with a certain compassion, as if I were another son suffering from the same ailment that had made her shed so many tears for her own.
That house was for me the revelation of a world I had perhaps intuited when I was fourteen but never had imagined how much. After that first day I became its most assiduous visitor, and I took up so much of the poet’s time that even today I cannot explain how he could stand me. I have come to think that he used me to try out his literary theories, arbitrary, perhaps, but dazzling, on an astonished but inoffensive interlocutor. He lent me books by poets I had never heard of, and I talked to him about them without the slightest awareness of my audacity. Above all Neruda, whose “Poem Twenty” I memorized in order to infuriate one or two Jesuits who did not travel those byways of poetry. At that time the cultural ambience of the city was excited by Meira Delmar’s poem to Cartagena de Indias, which saturated all the media along the coast. The mastery of diction and voice with which César del Valle read it to me was so great that I learned it by heart after the second reading.
On many other occasions we could not talk because César was writing, in his own fashion. He walked through rooms and hallways as if he were in another world, and every two or three minutes he would pass in front of me like a sleepwalker, and then without warning he would sit at the typewriter, write a line, a word, a semicolon, perhaps, and go back to his walking. I observed him, dazzled by the celestial emotion of discovering the only and secret way to write poetry. He was always like that during my years at Colegio San José, which gave me the rhetorical basis for setting free my demons. The last news I had of that unforgettable poet, two years later in Bogotá, was a telegram from Valentina with the only two words she did not have the heart to sign: “César died.”
My first emotion in a Barranquilla without my parents was an awareness of free will. I had friendships that I maintained outside of school. Among them Álvaro del Toro—who played second voice in my declamations during recess—and the Arteta tribe, with whom I would escape to bookstores and the movies. For the only restriction imposed on me in the house of Uncle Eliécer, in deference to his responsibility, was that I not come home after eight at night.
One day when I was waiting for César del Valle, reading in the living room of his house, a surprising woman came to visit him. Her name was Martina Fonseca, a white cast in the mold of an intelligent, autonomous mulatta, who may well have been the poet’s lover. For two or three hours I lived to the full the pleasure of conversing with her, until César came home and they left together without saying where they were going. I heard nothing more about her until Ash Wednesday of that year, when I left High Mass and found her waiting for me on a bench in the park. I thought she was an apparition. She was wearing a dress of embroidered linen that purified her beauty, a bead necklace, and a flower of living fire in her low-cut neckline. Still, what I now appreciate most in memory is the way she invited me to her house without the slightest indication of premeditation, and without our considering the holy sign of the ashen cross that we both had on our foreheads. Her husband, a ship’s pilot on the Magdalena River, was on his regular twelve-day voyage. What was strange about his wife inviting me on a casual Saturday for hot chocolate and crullers? Except that the ritual was repeated for the rest of the year when her husband was away on his ship, and always from four to seven, which was the time of the children’s program at the Rex Theater, which in the house of Uncle Eliécer served as my excuse for being with her.
Her professional specialty was preparing elementary-school teachers for promotions. She attended the best qualified in her free hours with hot chocolate and crullers, so that the new pupil on Saturdays did not attract the attention of her talkative neighbors. The fluidity of the secret love that burned over a blazing fire from March to November was surprising. After the first two Saturdays I thought I would not be able to endure my raging desire to be with her all the time.
We were safe from all danger because her husband would announce his arrival in the city with a code so that she would know he was coming into port. That is what happened on the third Saturday of our affair, when we were in bed and the distant howl was heard. She became tense.
“Be still,” she said to me and waited for two more howls. She did not jump out of bed, as I expected on account of my own fear, but she continued, undaunted: “We still have more than three hours of life left.”
She had described him to me as a “huge black over two meters tall with an artilleryman’s tool.” I was about to break the rules of the game because of an attack of jealousy, and not in a casual way: I wanted to kill him. Her maturity resolved everything, and from then on she led me by the halter past the pitfalls of real life as if I were a wolf cub in sheep’s clothing.
I was doing very poor work in school and did not want to hear anything about it, but Martina took charge of my student’s Calvary. She was surprised by the childishness of neglecting classes in order to humor the demon of an irresistible vocation for life. “It’s logical,” I told her. “If this bed were the academy and you were
the teacher, I’d be number one not only in class but in the whole school.” She took this as a good example.
“That’s just what we’re going to do,” she said.
Without too many sacrifices she undertook the task of my rehabilitation with a fixed schedule. She organized assignments for me and prepared me for the following week between tumbles in bed and a mother’s reprimands. If my homework was not correct and on time, she would punish me with the interdiction of one Saturday for every three failures. I never went past two. The change began to be noticed at school.
However, what she taught me in practice was an infallible formula that was of use to me, sad to say, only in the last year of my baccalaureate: if I paid attention in classes and did the assignments myself instead of copying them from my classmates, I would get a good grade and be able to read as much as I liked in my free hours, and lead my own life without exhausting all-night study sessions or useless fears. Thanks to this magical prescription I was first in the class that year of 1942 and received a medal of excellence and all kinds of honorable mentions. But confidential gratitude went to the doctors for how well they had cured me of my madness. At the celebration I realized that there was a bad dose of cynicism in the emotion with which I had expressed my thanks in earlier years for the recognition of merits that were not mine. In my last year, when it was deserved, it seemed to me decent not to thank anyone. But I responded with all my heart with the poem “The Circus,” by Guillermo Valencia, which I recited in its entirety without a prompter in the final ceremony, more frightened than a Christian facing the lions.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 19
