During the vacation of that good year I had planned to visit my grandmother Tranquilina in Aracataca, but she had to go to Barranquilla for urgent surgery on her cataracts. The happiness of seeing her again was made complete by my grandfather’s dictionary, which she brought to me as a gift. She had never been aware that she was losing her sight, or had refused to admit it, until she could no longer leave her room. The operation at the Caridad Hospital was quick and had a good prognosis. When the bandages were removed, while she was sitting on the bed, she opened the shining eyes of her renewed youth and summarized her joy in three words:
“I can see.”
The surgeon tried to determine just what she could see, and she swept the room with her new eyes and enumerated each thing with admirable precision. The doctor was astounded, but only I knew that the things my grandmother enumerated were not the ones in front of her in the hospital room but the ones in her bedroom in Aracataca, which she knew by heart and remembered in their correct order. She never recovered her sight.
My parents insisted that I spend the vacation with them in Sucre and bring my grandmother with me. Much older than her age warranted, and with her mind adrift, the beauty of her voice had been refined and my grandmother sang more and with more inspiration than ever. My mother made certain she was kept clean and dressed, like an enormous doll. It was evident she was aware of the world but referred everything to the past. Above all radio programs, which awakened a childish interest in her. She recognized the voices of various announcers whom she identified as friends of her youth in Riohacha, because she had never had a radio in her house in Aracataca. She contradicted or criticized some commentaries by the announcers, discussed the most varied subjects with them or reproached them for grammatical errors, as if they were present in the flesh beside her bed, and she refused to have her clothes changed until they took their leave. Then she would respond with her good manners intact:
“Have a very pleasant evening, Señor.”
Many mysteries regarding lost objects, secrets that had been kept, or forbidden subjects were clarified in her monologues: who hid the water basin that disappeared from the house in Aracataca in her trunk and then made off with it, who really had been the father of Matilde Salmona, who had been riddled with bullets when his brothers confused him with someone else.
My first vacation in Sucre without Martina Fonseca was not easy, but there was not even the slightest possibility that she would go away with me. The mere idea of not seeing her for two months had seemed unreal to me. But not to her. On the contrary, when I brought up the subject she was already, as usual, three steps ahead of me.
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” she said without any mystery. “The best thing for both of us would be if you went to study somewhere else now that we’re both raving mad. Then you’ll realize that what we have will never be more than what it already was.”
I thought she was joking.
“I’ll leave tomorrow and be back in three months to stay with you.”
She replied with tango music:
“Ha, ha, ha, ha!”
Then I learned that Martina was easy to persuade when she said yes but never when she said no. And so I accepted the challenge, bathed in tears, and proposed being another person in the life she planned for me: another city, another school, another group of friends, even another way of living. I barely thought about it. With the authority of my many medals, the first thing I said to my father with a certain solemnity was that I would not return to the Colegio San José. Or to Barranquilla.
“God be praised!” he said. “I’ve always wondered where you got the romantic idea of studying with the Jesuits.”
My mother ignored his comments.
“If it’s not there, it has to be in Bogotá,” she said.
“Then it won’t be anywhere,” replied Papá without delay, “because no money is ever enough for the Cachacos.”
It is strange, but the mere idea of not continuing to study, which had been the dream of my life, now seemed unimaginable. To the point where I had recourse to a dream that never had seemed attainable.
“There are scholarships,” I said.
“Lots,” said Papá, “but for the rich.”
In part this was true, not because of favoritism but because the application procedures were difficult and the requirements not well publicized. As a result of centralism, everyone who aspired to a scholarship had to go to Bogotá, a distance of a thousand kilometers in eight days of travel that cost almost as much as three months at a good boarding school. But even so it might be pointless. My mother became exasperated:
“When you start scheming about money, you know where it begins but not where it ends.”
Besides, there were other obligations that had not yet been paid. Luis Enrique, a year younger than I, had matriculated in two local schools and had dropped out of both of them after a few months. Margarita and Aida were doing well at the nuns’ primary school, but they had already begun thinking about a cheaper city nearby for their baccalaureates. Gustavo, Ligia, Rita, and Jaime were not yet a pressing concern, but they were growing at an alarming rate. They, as well as the three who were born after them, treated me like someone who always arrived only to leave again.
It was my decisive year. The greatest attraction of each float were the girls chosen for their grace and beauty, and dressed like queens, who recited verses that alluded to the symbolic war between the two halves of the town. Still half an outsider, I enjoyed the privilege of being neutral, which is how I behaved. That year, however, I gave in to the pleas of the captains of Congoveo to write the verses for my sister Carmen Rosa, who would be the queen of a monumental float. I was delighted to oblige, but because of my ignorance of the rules of the game, I went too far in my attacks on the adversary. I had no other recourse but to rectify the transgression with two poems of peace: one of atonement for the beauty from Congoveo and another of reconciliation for the beauty from Zulia. The incident became public. The anonymous poet, almost unknown in town, was the hero of the day. The episode introduced me into society and earned me the friendship of both bands. From then on I did not have enough time to help at children’s plays, charity bazaars, philanthropic fairs, and even the speech of a candidate for the municipal council.
Luis Enrique, who was already showing signs of the inspired guitarist he would become, taught me to play the tiple, the treble guitar. With him and Filadelfo Velilla we became the kings of serenades, the first prize being that some of the serenaded girls dressed in a hurry, opened the house, woke the girls next door, and we continued the party until breakfast. That year the group was enhanced when it was joined by José Palencia, the grandson of a wealthy and generous landowner. José was a born musician capable of playing any instrument he came across. He looked like a movie star, was a stellar dancer, had a dazzling intelligence, and luck more envied than enviable in transient loves.
I, on the other hand, did not know how to dance and could not learn even in the house of the Señoritas Loiseau, six sisters, invalids from birth, who nonetheless gave classes in fine dancing without getting up from their rocking chairs. My father, never insensitive to reputation, approached me with a new point of view. For the first time we spent long hours talking. We almost did not know each other. In reality, looking back on it, I did not live with my parents for a total of more than three years, adding up the time with them in Aracataca, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Sincé, and Sucre. It was a very agreeable experience that allowed me to know them better. My mother said to me: “How nice that you’ve become friends with your papá.” Days later, while she was preparing coffee in the kitchen, she said even more:
“Your papá is very proud of you.”
The next day she tiptoed in to wake me and breathed in my ear: “Your papá has a surprise for you.” In fact, when he came down for breakfast, he himself gave me the news in the presence of everyone, and said with a solemn emphasis:
“Get your stuff together, you’re going
to Bogotá.”
The initial impact was one of great frustration, because what I would have wanted then was to remain submerged in perpetual carousing. But innocence prevailed. There was no problem about clothes for cold weather. My father had a black cheviot twill suit and another of corduroy, and he could not button either one at the waist. We went to Pedro León Rosales, called the tailor of miracles, and he altered them to fit me. My mother also bought me the camel’s hair overcoat of a dead senator. When she was measuring it on me at home, my sister Ligia—who is a natural clairvoyant—warned me in secret that the ghost of the senator was wandering through his house at night wearing the overcoat. I paid no attention to her, but I should have, because when I put it on in Bogotá, I saw the face of the dead senator in the mirror. I pawned it for ten pesos and never redeemed it.
The domestic atmosphere had improved so much that I was on the verge of tears when we said our goodbyes, but the plan was followed in a precise way, without sentimentality. In the second week of January, in Magangué, I embarked on the David Arango, the flagship of the Colombian Shipping Company, after spending one night as a free man. My cabinmate was an angel who weighed two hundred twenty pounds and whose entire body was hairless. He had usurped the name Jack the Ripper, and he was the last survivor of a family of circus knife throwers from Asia Minor. At first glance he looked capable of strangling me in my sleep, but in the days that followed I realized he was only what he seemed: a giant baby with a heart too big for his body.
There was an official party on the first night, with an orchestra and a gala supper, but I escaped to the deck, contemplated for the last time the lights of the world I was preparing to forget without sorrow, and cried my eyes out until dawn. Today I can dare to say that the only reason I would want to be a boy again is to enjoy that voyage once more. I had to take the trip back and forth several times during the four years of the baccalaureate and another two at the university, and each time I learned more about life than I did in school, and learned it better than I did in school. At the time of year when the water was high, it was a five-day trip from Barranquilla to Puerto Salgar, where you then had to travel by train to Bogotá. In times of drought, when sailing was more amusing if you were not in a hurry, it could take up to three weeks.
The ships had easy, basic names: Atlántico, Medellín, Capitán de Caro, David Arango. Their captains, like those of Conrad, were authoritarian, good-natured men who ate like savages and did not know how to sleep alone in their regal cabins. The voyages were slow and surprising. We passengers sat in the galleries all day in order to see the forgotten villages, the coffin-shaped caimans, their jaws open waiting for unwary butterflies, the flocks of herons that took flight, startled by the wake of the ship, the coveys of ducks from the interior swamps, the manatees that sang on the wide beaches as they suckled their babies. During the whole voyage you woke at dawn dazed by the clamoring of monkeys and cockatoos. Often, your siesta was interrupted by the nauseating stench of a drowned cow, motionless in the trickle of water, a solitary turkey buzzard perched on its belly.
Now it is unusual to meet anyone on a plane. On the riverboats we students ended up seeming like one family, because every year we would arrange to make the trip at the same time. At times the ship would be stranded for up to fifteen days on a sandbar. No one cared, because the fiesta continued, and a letter from the captain sealed with his signet ring served as an excuse for arriving late at school.
From the first day I was struck by the youngest member of a family group who played the bandoneón as if half asleep, strolling for days on end along the deck in first class. I could not endure my envy, because ever since I heard the first accordion players of Francisco el Hombre on the July 20 celebrations in Aracataca I had urged my grandfather to buy me an accordion, but my grandmother always blocked us with the usual absurdities about the accordion being a vulgar instrument for the lower classes. Some thirty years later in Paris I thought I recognized the elegant accordionist from the ship at an international conference of neurologists. Time had done its work: he had grown a bohemian beard and his clothes were larger by a couple of sizes, but the memory of his artistry was so vivid I could not be mistaken. His reaction, however, could not have been colder when I asked him without introducing myself:
“How’s the bandoneón?”
He replied in surprise:
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I felt the earth swallowing me, and I gave him my humble excuses for having confused him with a student who played the bandoneón on the David Arango early in January of 1944. Then he gleamed with the memory. He was the Colombian Salomón Hakim, one of the great neurologists in this world. The disappointment was that he had exchanged the bandoneón for medical engineering.
Another passenger attracted my attention because of his distance. He was young, robust, with a ruddy complexion, glasses for nearsightedness, and a premature baldness that he carried off very well. He seemed the perfect image of the Cachaco tourist. From the first day he cornered the most comfortable armchair, placed several towers of new books on an end table, and read without blinking from the morning until he was distracted by the carousing at night. Every day he appeared in the dining room wearing a different flowered beach shirt, and he ate breakfast, lunch, and supper, and continued reading alone at the most isolated table. I do not believe he had exchanged a single greeting with anyone. In my mind I baptized him “the insatiable reader.”
I did not resist the temptation of sneaking a look at his books. Most were indigestible treatises on public law, which he read in the mornings, underlining and making notes in the margins. When the afternoons grew cool he read novels. Among them, one that astonished me: Dostoyevsky’s The Double, which I had tried without success to steal from a bookstore in Barranquilla. I was mad to read it. In fact, I would have asked to borrow it but did not have the courage. One day he showed up with The Great Meaulnes, which I had not heard of but which very soon became one of my favorite masterpieces. On the other hand, I carried only unrepeatable books that I had already read: Jeromín, by Father Coloma, that I never finished reading; The Vortex, by José Eustasio Rivera; From the Apennines to the Andes, by Edmundo de Amicis, and my grandfather’s dictionary, which I read for hours. The implacable reader, on the contrary, did not have enough time for all the books he had. What I mean to say and have not said is that I would have given anything to be him.
The third traveler, of course, was Jack the Ripper, my roommate, who talked in his sleep in a barbaric tongue for hours on end. His speeches had a melodic quality that gave a new depth to my readings in the middle of the night. He told me he was not aware of it and did not know what language he could be dreaming in, because as a boy he could talk with the acrobats in his circus in six Asian dialects but had forgotten all of them when his mother died. All that was left was Polish, his original language, but we were able to establish that this was not what he was speaking in his sleep. I do not recall a creature more lovable as he oiled and tested the edges of his sinister knives on his rosy tongue.
His only problem had been on the first day in the dining room, when he protested to the waiters that he could not survive the voyage if they did not serve him four portions. The bosun explained that it would be fine if he paid for them as a supplement with a special discount. He claimed that he had traveled the oceans of the world and on all of them they had recognized his human right not to die of hunger. The case went all the way to the captain, who decided in very Colombian fashion that he should be served two portions, and that the waiters could be distracted enough to let two more slip from their hands. He also helped himself by picking with his fork at the plates of his table companions and a few neighbors without appetite who took pleasure in his ideas. You had to be there to believe it.
I did not know what to do with myself until La Gloria, where a group of students boarded and formed trios and quartets at night and sang beautiful serenades of romantic boleros. When I discovered that t
hey had an extra tiple, I took it over and rehearsed with them in the afternoons, and we would sing until dawn. The tedium of my free time found a remedy in a solution that came from the heart: whoever does not sing cannot imagine the pleasure of singing.
One night when there was a full moon we were awakened by a heartrending lament from the riverbank. The captain, Climaco Conde Abello, one of the greatest of them, gave an order to use searchlights to find the origin of the weeping: it was a manatee female who had become entangled in the branches of a fallen tree. Launches went into the water, and they moored her to a capstan and managed to free her. She was a fantastic, touching creature, half woman and half cow, almost four meters long. Her skin was livid and tender, and her large-breasted torso was that of a biblical matriarch. It was this same Captain Conde Abello whom I heard say, for the first time, that the world would come to an end if people kept killing the animals in the river, and he prohibited shooting from his boat.
“Whoever wants to kill somebody can go kill him in his own house!” he shouted. “Not on my ship!”
January 19, 1961, seventeen years later, I remember as a hateful day because a friend called me in Mexico to tell me that the steamship David Arango had caught fire and burned to ashes in the port of Magangué. I hung up with the terrible realization that my youth had ended that day, and the little still left to us of our river of nostalgic memories had gone to hell. Today the Magdalena River is dead, its waters polluted, its animals annihilated. The work of restoration talked about so much by successive governments that have done nothing would require the planting by experts of some sixty million trees on ninety percent of privately owned lands whose owners would have to give up, for sheer love of country, ninety percent of their current incomes.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 20
