Each voyage taught great lessons about life that connected us in an ephemeral but unforgettable way to the life of the towns we passed through, and many of us became forever caught up in their destinies. A renowned medical student went to a wedding dance uninvited, danced without permission with the prettiest woman at the party, and was shot to death by her husband. Another, in an epic bout of drinking, married the first girl he liked in Puerto Berrío and is still happy with her and their nine children. José Palencia, our friend from Sucre, won a cow in a drummers’ competition in Tenerife and sold it on the spot for fifty pesos: a fortune at the time. In the immense red-light district in Barrancabermeja, the oil capital, we were astounded to find Angel Casij Palencia, José’s first cousin who had disappeared without a trace from Sucre the previous year, singing with the band in a brothel. The band took care of the bill for the dancing and carousing that lasted until dawn.
My ugliest memory is of a gloomy tavern in Puerto Berrío, where the police drove four of us passengers out with clubs, not giving or listening to any explanations, and arrested us on the charge of having raped a female student. When we reached police headquarters they already had the real culprits—some local thugs who had nothing to do with our boat—behind bars, without a scratch.
At the final port of call, Puerto Salgar, we had to disembark at five in the morning dressed for the high country. Men in black wool with vests and mushroom-shaped hats and topcoats over their arms had changed identities surrounded by the psaltery of the toads and the pestilential stink of the river overflowing with dead animals. When it was time to go ashore I had an unexpected surprise. An eleventh-hour friend had convinced my mother to make me a Corroncho, or coastal petate, with its narrow string hammock, wool blanket, and an emergency chamber pot, all of it wrapped in a mat made of esparto grass and tied into a cross with the cords of the hammock. My musical companions could not contain their laughter at seeing me with that kind of baggage in the cradle of civilization, and the most determined of them did what I would not have dared to do: he threw it into the water. My final vision of that unforgettable trip was the sight of the petate returning to its origins as it rolled in the current.
During the first four hours the train from Puerto Salgar climbed the rock cornices as if it were crawling. On the steepest sections it would slide back in order to gather momentum and attempt the ascent again, breathing as hard as a dragon. At times it was necessary for the passengers to get out to lighten the load and climb to the next cornice on foot. The towns along the way were sad and ice-cold, and in the deserted stations all that waited for us were the women who were lifelong vendors and offered through the train windows fat yellow chickens cooked whole and some snowy potatoes that tasted like heaven. That was where I felt for the first time an unknown and invisible physical state: cold. It was fortunate that at dusk, the immense savannas, as green and beautiful as a sea in heaven, opened without warning toward the horizon. The world became tranquil and fast-moving. The atmosphere in the train changed.
I had forgotten altogether about the insatiable reader when he appeared all of a sudden and sat across from me with a look of urgency. It was incredible. He had been impressed by a bolero that we sang at night on the ship, and he asked me to copy it down for him. Not only did I do that, but I taught him how to sing it. I was surprised by his good ear and the brilliance of his voice when he sang it alone the first time, without mistakes.
“That woman’s going to die when she hears it!” he exclaimed, radiant.
Then I understood his urgency. When he heard us sing the bolero on the ship, he felt it would be a revelation for the sweetheart who had said goodbye to him three months earlier in Bogotá and was waiting for him that afternoon in the station. He had heard it again two or three times, and was able to reconstruct it in bits and pieces, but when he saw me sitting alone on the train, he had resolved to ask the favor. Then I also felt bold enough to tell him, with some malice, though it had nothing to do with anything, how surprised I had been to see on his table a book that was so difficult to find. His surprise was authentic:
“Which one?”
“The Double.”
He laughed with satisfaction.
“I haven’t finished it yet,” he said. “But it’s one of the strangest things I’ve come across.”
He went no further. He thanked me in every way possible for the bolero and said goodbye with a firm handshake.
It was beginning to grow dark when the train slowed, passed by a shed filled with rusted scrap iron, and anchored at a gloomy dock. I grasped my trunk by the handle and dragged it toward the street before the crowd could knock me down. I was almost there when someone shouted:
“Young man! ¡Joven!”
I turned around, as did several young men and others less young who were running along with me, and the insatiable reader passed me and handed me a book without stopping.
“Enjoy it!” he shouted, and disappeared into the crowd.
The book was The Double. I was so stunned I did not realize what had just happened to me. I put the book into the pocket of my overcoat, and the icy wind of dusk struck me when I walked out of the station. About to perish, I put the trunk on the platform and sat on it to breathe in the air I needed. There was not a soul on the streets. The little I managed to see was the corner of a sinister, glacial avenue under a light rain mixed with soot, at an altitude of two thousand four hundred meters, in polar air that made respiration difficult.
Dying of the cold, I waited no less than half an hour. Someone had to come, because my father had sent an urgent telegram to Don Eliécer Torres Arango, a relative of his who would be my host. But what concerned me then was not if someone was coming or not coming, but my fear of sitting on a sepulchral trunk not knowing anyone on the other side of the world. Then a distinguished man got out of a taxi, carrying a silk umbrella and wearing a camel’s hair coat that came down to his ankles. I understood that he was my host, though he only glanced at me and walked by, and I did not have the audacity to signal him in any way. He hurried into the station and came out again minutes later with no expression of hope. At last he saw me and pointed with his index finger:
“You’re Gabito, right?”
I answered him with all my heart:
“Almost, now.”
4
AT THAT TIME Bogotá was a remote, lugubrious city where an insomniac rain had been falling since the beginning of the sixteenth century. I noticed that on the street there were too many hurrying men, dressed like me when I arrived, in black wool and bowler hats. On the other hand, not a single consolatory woman could be seen, for they, like priests in cassocks and soldiers in uniform, were not permitted to enter the gloomy cafés in the business district. In the streetcars and public urinals there was a melancholy sign: “If you don’t fear God, fear syphilis.”
I was struck by the gigantic Percherons that pulled the beer wagons, the pyrotechnical sparks made by the streetcars when they turned corners, and the stopping of traffic to allow funeral processions to make their way on foot through the rain. They were the most mournful, with luxurious carriages, and horses decked out in velvet and headpieces with large black feathers, and corpses from good families who behaved like the inventors of death. In the atrium of the Church of Las Nieves I caught a glimpse from the taxi of the first woman I had seen on the streets: slim and reserved, as elegant as a queen of mourning, but I was left forever with only half an illusion because her face was covered by an impassable veil.
It was a moral collapse. The house where I spent the night was large and comfortable, but it seemed spectral to me because of its gloomy garden with dark roses and a cold that crushed one’s bones. It belonged to the Torres Gamboa family, relatives of my father whom I knew, but at supper, wrapped in sleeping blankets, they looked like strangers to me. My greatest shock was when I slipped between the sheets and shouted in horror because they felt soaked in an icy liquid. They explained that it was like this the first time and little by li
ttle I would become accustomed to the oddities of the climate. I wept for long hours in silence before falling into an unhappy sleep.
This was my state of mind four days after I had arrived, as I walked at top speed, as a defense against the cold and drizzle, to the Ministry of Education, where they were about to open registration for the national scholarship competition. The line began on the third floor of the ministry, facing the actual door to the registration offices, and snaked down the stairs to the main entrance. The spectacle was disheartening. By the time the sky cleared, at about ten in the morning, the line stretched two more blocks to the Avenida Jiménez de Quesada and did not include the applicants who had taken refuge in doorways. It seemed impossible to win anything in a competition like that one.
A little after noon I felt two taps on my shoulder. It was the insatiable reader from the ship, who had recognized me among the last people in line, but it was hard for me to identify him in the mushroom-shaped hat and funereal clothing the Cachacos wore. He was perplexed, too, and he asked me:
“But what the hell are you doing here?”
I told him.
“That’s really funny!” he said, weak with laughter. “Come with me.” And he led me by the arm to the ministry. Then I found out that he was Dr. Adolfo Gómez Támara, national director of scholarships for the Ministry of Education.
It was the least plausible coincidence, and one of the most fortunate of my life. With a joke of pure student ancestry, Gómez Támara introduced me to his assistants as the most inspired singer of romantic boleros. They served me coffee and registered me with no further formalities, though they told me first that they were not showing contempt for application forms but paying tribute to the unfathomable gods of chance. They informed me that the general examination would take place the following Monday in the Colegio de San Bartolomé. They estimated there were some thousand applicants from all over the country for three hundred scholarships, which meant the battle would be long, difficult, and perhaps a mortal blow to my hopes. The recipients would learn the results in a week, along with information about the school to which they had been assigned. This was something new and serious for me, because they could just as well send me to Medellín as to Vichada. They explained that the geographical lottery was intended to stimulate cultural mobility among the various regions. When they finished the application forms, Gómez Támara shook my hand with the same enthusiastic energy he had shown when he thanked me for the bolero.
“Be smart, now,” he said. “Your life is in your hands.”
As I left the ministry, a little man of clerical appearance offered to obtain a sure scholarship for me to the school of my choice, without any exams, for a fee of fifty pesos. To me that was a fortune, but I believe that if I’d had it I would have paid it to avoid the terror of the examination. Days later I recognized the charlatan in a newspaper photograph as the head of a gang of swindlers who dressed like priests to arrange illicit deals in official institutions.
I did not unpack my trunk, certain they would send me somewhere else. My pessimism was so intense that on the eve of the examination I went with the musicians from the boat to a rough tavern in the rundown Las Cruces district. We sang for our drinks at the price of one song for a glass of chicha, the barbaric drink of fermented corn that exquisite drunkards refined with gunpowder. And so I came to the exam late, with a throbbing head and not even a memory of where I had been or who brought me home the night before, but for charity’s sake they received me in an immense hall crowded with applicants. A quick glance at the questions was enough for me to know I was defeated before I even began. To fool the monitors, I whiled away the time on the social sciences, where the questions seemed the least cruel. But then I felt possessed by an aura of inspiration that allowed me to improvise credible answers and miraculous lucky guesses. Except in mathematics, which not even God could make me understand. The exam in drawing, which I did in haste, but with success, was a relief. “It must have been a miracle of the chicha,” my musicians told me. In any case, I finished in a state of final surrender, determined to write a letter to my parents regarding my rights and my reasons for not returning home.
I fulfilled my duty to request the results a week later. The clerk at the reception desk must have recognized some mark in my file because without saying a word she took me to the director. I found him in a very good mood, in shirtsleeves and wearing fancy red suspenders. He reviewed the grades on my examination with professional attention, hesitated once or twice, and at last took a breath.
“Not bad,” he said to himself. “Except in math, but you scraped by thanks to the five in drawing.”
He leaned back in his swivel chair and asked me what school I had in mind.
It was one of my historic shocks, but I did not hesitate:
“San Bartolomé, here in Bogotá.”
He placed the palm of his hand on a pile of papers on his desk.
“All these are letters from very influential people recommending children, relatives, and friends to secondary schools here,” he said. He realized he had not been obliged to say this, and he went on: “If you’ll permit me to help you, what would be best for you is the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquirá an hour away by train.”
The only thing I knew about that historic city was that it had salt mines. Gómez Támara explained that it was a colonial secondary school expropriated from a religious community by a recent liberal reform, and it now had a splendid faculty of young, liberal teachers. I thought it was my duty to clarify matters.
“My papá’s a Goth,” I told him.
He burst into laughter.
“Don’t be so serious,” he said. “I mean liberal in the sense of being broad-minded.”
He recovered his own style right away and decided that my fate lay in that old seventeenth-century convent that had been transformed into a school of unbelievers in a sleepy town where there were no distractions other than studying. The old cloister, in fact, remained impassive before eternity. In its earlier period it had a legend cut into the stone portico: El principio de la sabiduría es el temor de Dios—“The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God.” But the device was exchanged for the seal of Colombia when the Liberal government of President Alfonso López Pumarejo nationalized education in 1936. At the entrance, as I recovered from the asphyxia caused by the weight of my trunk, I was depressed by the small courtyard with colonial arches carved out of living rock, with wooden balconies painted green and melancholy pots of flowers on the railings. Everything seemed subjected to a confessional order, and you could see with far too much clarity that in more than three hundred years nothing there had known the indulgence of a woman’s hands. Brought up in the lawless spaces of the Caribbean, I was assaulted by the terror of spending the four decisive years of my adolescence in that time that had run aground.
Even today it seems impossible that two floors surrounding a taciturn courtyard, and another masonry building improvised on a plot of land in the rear, could house the residence and office of the rector, the administrative offices, the kitchen, the dining room, the library, six classrooms, the physics and chemistry laboratory, the storeroom, the sanitary facilities, and the dormitory with iron beds arranged in rows for fifty pupils dragged in from the most depressed suburbs in the nation, but very few from the capital. To my good fortune, that state of exile was one more favor from my lucky star. Because of it, I soon learned the nature of the country I had won in the world’s raffle. The dozen Caribbean compatriots who claimed me as one of their own as soon as I arrived, and I as well, of course, made impassable distinctions between ourselves and the others: the natives and the outsiders.
The various groups distributed among the corners of the courtyard, beginning with recess on the first evening, were a rich sampling of the nation. There were no rivalries as long as each group stayed on its own terrain. My immediate relationships were with people from the Caribbean coast, for we had a well-deserved reputation for being noisy, fanatics about group sol
idarity, and wild carousers at dances. I was an exception, but Antonio Martínez Sierra, a rumba dancer from Cartagena, taught me to dance to popular tunes during the nighttime recreational periods. Ricardo González Ripoll, my great accomplice in furtive courtships, became a famous architect who nonetheless never interrupted the same almost inaudible song that he hummed to himself and danced to alone until the end of his days.
Mincho Anaya, a born pianist who became the conductor of a national dance orchestra, founded the school band with any students who wanted to learn an instrument, and he taught me the secret of the second voice in boleros and vallenatos. His greatest feat, however, was training Guillermo López Guerra, a pure Bogotán, in the Caribbean art of playing the claves, which is a question of three-two, three-two.
Humberto Jaimes, from El Banco, was a relentless student who was never interested in dancing and who sacrificed his weekends to stay at school studying. I believe he had never seen a soccer ball or read an account of any kind of game, until he graduated as an engineer in Bogotá and joined El Tiempo as an apprentice sportswriter, where he became editor of his section and one of the fine soccer reporters in the country. In any event, the strangest case I remember was without a doubt that of Silvio Luna, a dark-skinned black from Chocó who graduated as a lawyer and then as a physician, and seemed ready to initiate his third career when I lost track of him.
Daniel Rozo (Pagocio) always behaved like an adept in all the human and divine sciences, and he was prodigal with them in class and during recess. We always came to him to learn about the state of the world during the Second World War, which we just managed to follow through rumors, since the regular entrance of newspapers or magazines into the school was not authorized, and we used the radio only to dance with one another. We never had the opportunity to determine where Pagocio found his historic battles in which the Allies were always victorious.
Sergio Castro—from Quetame—was perhaps the best student in all the grades at the liceo, and from his first day he always received the highest grades. I think his secret was the same one Martina Fonseca had advised me to use at the Colegio San José: he did not miss a word the teacher said or any of his classmates’ remarks, he took notes even on his instructors’ breathing, and he arranged them in a perfect notebook. Perhaps for the same reason he did not need to spend time preparing for exams, and he would read adventure novels on the weekends while the rest of us burned ourselves out cramming.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 21
