A short while after my arrival, I had to write the inaugural address for some official ceremony at the liceo. Most of the teachers approved the topic but agreed that in such cases the rector had the final word. He lived at the top of the stairs on the second floor, but I suffered the distance as if it were a trip on foot around the world. I had not slept well the night before, I put on my Sunday tie, and I had no appetite for breakfast. My knocking on the rectory door was so slow that the rector did not open it until my third knock, and he stepped aside for me without a greeting. Just as well, because I would not have had the voice to reply, not only because of his brusqueness but because of the grandness, order, and beauty of his office with its furniture of noble woods and velvet upholstery, and its walls lined with astonishing bookcases filled with leatherbound volumes. The rector waited with formal solemnity until I caught my breath. Then he pointed to the visitor’s easy chair in front of the desk, and he sat down in his.
I had prepared the explanation for my visit with almost as much attention as the address. He listened in silence, approved each sentence with a nod of his head, still not looking at me but at the paper trembling in my hand. At some point that I thought amusing I tried to win a smile from him, but it was useless. Even more: I am sure he already knew the reason for my visit but made me comply with the ritual of explaining it to him.
When I finished he extended his hand over the desk and accepted the paper. He removed his glasses in order to read it with profound attention, and he stopped only to make two corrections with his pen. Then he put on his glasses and spoke, not looking me in the eye, in a stony voice that made my heart pound.
“There are two problems here,” he said to me. “You wrote: ‘In harmony with the exhuberant flora of our country, which the learned Spaniard José Celestino Mutis revealed to the world in the eighteenth century, in this liceo we live in a paradisíacal environment.’ But the fact is that exuberant is spelled without an h and paradisiacal has no accent mark.”
I felt humiliated. I had no answer for the first objection but I had no doubt about the second, and without delay I replied with what remained of my voice:
“Excuse me, Señor Rector, the dictionary allows paradisiacal with or without an accent mark, but the dactyl seemed more sonorous to me.”
He must have felt as assaulted as I did, because he still did not look at me but took the dictionary from the shelf without saying a word. My heart skipped a beat because it was the same Atlas that had belonged to my grandfather, but new and shining and perhaps unused. At the first try he opened it to the exact page, read and reread the entry, and asked me without looking up from the page:
“What year are you in?”
“Third,” I said.
He slammed the dictionary shut with a bang and looked me in the eye for the first time.
“Bravo,” he said. “Keep it up.”
From that day on the only thing missing was for my classmates to proclaim me a hero, and with all the sarcasm possible they began to call me “the kid from the coast who talked to the rector.” However, what affected me most in the interview was having confronted once again my personal drama with spelling. I never could understand it. One of my teachers tried to give me the coup de grace with the news that Simón Bolívar did not deserve his glory because of his terrible orthography. Others consoled me with the excuse that it is a problem for many people. Even today, when I have published seventeen books, my proofreaders honor me with the courtesy of correcting my spelling atrocities as if they were simple typographical errors.
Social gatherings in Zipaquirá corresponded in general to the vocation and nature of each person. The salt mines, active when the Spaniards found them, were a tourist attraction on weekends, which were finished off with a brisket baked in the oven and snowy potatoes in large pans of salt. The boarders from the coast, with our well-deserved reputation for rowdiness and ill-breeding, had the good manners to dance like artists to popular music and the good taste to fall in love forever.
I became so spontaneous that on the day the end of the war was announced, we took to the streets in a show of jubilation with flags, placards, and shouts of victory. Someone asked for a volunteer to make a speech, and without giving it a second thought I went out to the balcony of the social club facing the main square and improvised one with bombastic shouts that many people thought had been memorized.
It was the only speech I found myself obliged to improvise in the first seventy years of my life. I ended with a lyrical tribute to each of the Big Four, but the one that attracted attention in the square was for the president of the United States, who had died a short while before: “Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, like El Cid, knows how to win battles after death.” The sentence remained afloat in the city for several days and was reproduced on street posters and on portraits of Roosevelt in the windows of some stores. And so my first public success was not as a poet or a novelist but as an orator, and what is even worse, as a political orator. From then on there was no public ceremony at the liceo when they did not put me on a balcony, but now I had written speeches that had been corrected down to the last breath.
With time, that brazenness served to give me a case of stage fright that brought me to the point of an absolute inability to speak, whether at large weddings, or in taverns filled with Indians in ponchos and hemp sandals where we would end up on the floor, or at the house of Berenice, who was beautiful and free of prejudices and who had the good fortune not to marry me because she was mad with love for someone else, or at the telegraph office, whose unforgettable Sarita would send anguished telegrams on credit when my parents were late with their remittances for my personal expenses, and more than once would advance me money orders to get me out of difficulty. But the least forgettable girl was not anyone’s love but the nymph of the poetry addicts. Her name was Cecilia González Pizano, and she had a quick intelligence, personal charm, and a free spirit in a family whose tradition was conservative, and a supernatural memory for all poetry. She lived across from the entrance to the liceo with an aristocratic, unmarried aunt in a colonial mansion that surrounded a garden of heliotropes. At first it was a relationship confined to poetic competitions, but Cecilia became a true comrade in life, always filled with laughter, who in the end managed to sneak into Professor Calderón’s literature classes with everyone’s complicity.
In my days in Aracataca I had dreamed about the good life, going from fair to fair and singing with an accordion and a good voice, which always seemed to me to be the oldest and happiest way to tell a story. If my mother had renounced the piano in order to have children, and my father had hung up his violin in order to support us, it was not at all fair that the oldest of those children would set the good precedent of dying of hunger on account of music. My eventual participation as a singer and tiple player in the group at school proved that I had the ear to learn a more difficult instrument, and that I could sing.
There was no patriotic evening or solemn ceremony at the liceo in which I was not involved in some way, always through the grace of Maestro Guillermo Quevedo Zornosa, composer and leading citizen of the city, eternal conductor of the municipal band who wrote “Amapola”—the poppy on the road, as red as one’s heart—a song of youth that in its time was the soul of soirées and serenades. On Sundays after Mass I was one of the first to cross the park and attend his band concert, always with La gazza ladra at the beginning, and the Anvil Chorus, from Il trovatore, at the end. The maestro never knew, and I did not dare tell him, that the dream of my life during those years was to be like him.
When the liceo asked for volunteers for a class in music appreciation, Guillermo López Guerra and I were the first to raise our hands. The course would meet on Saturday mornings, led by Professor Andrés Pardo Tovar, director of the first program of classical music on The Voice of Bogotá. We did not occupy even a fourth of the dining room that had been arranged to accommodate the class, but we were seduced on the spot by his apostle’s fluency. He was the per
fect Cachaco, with a dark-blue blazer, a satin vest, a sinuous voice, and deliberate gestures. What would be noteworthy today because of its antiquity was the windup phonograph that he managed with the skill and love of a seal trainer. He began with the supposition—correct in our case—that we were utter novices. And so he began with Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, outlining with erudite facts the nature of each animal. Then he played—of course!—Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. The bad thing about that Saturday party was that it inculcated in me the embarrassed feeling that the music of the great masters is an almost secret vice, and it took me many years not to make arrogant distinctions between good and bad.
I had no further contact with the rector until the following year, when he took over the teaching of geometry in the fourth year. He walked into the classroom on the first Tuesday at ten in the morning, said good day with a growl, not looking at anyone, and cleaned the board with the eraser until there was no trace of dust. Then he turned to us, and still without having called roll, he asked Álvaro Ruiz Torres:
“What is a point?”
There was no time to answer, because the social sciences teacher opened the door without knocking and told the rector he had an urgent call from the Ministry of Education. The rector hurried out to answer the telephone and did not return to class. Never again, because the call was to inform him that he had been relieved of his position, which he had fulfilled with dedication for five years after a lifetime of devoted service.
His successor was the poet Carlos Martín, the youngest of the good poets from the Stone and Sky group that César del Valle had helped me to discover in Barranquilla. He had published thirty-three books. I knew poems of his and had seen him once in a bookstore in Bogotá, but I never had anything to say to him, and I did not own any of his books so I could not ask him to sign one. One Monday he appeared unannounced at the lunchtime recess. We had not expected him so soon. He looked more like a lawyer than a poet, with his pinstripe suit, high forehead, and pencil-thin mustache that had a formal rigor also notable in his poetry. Placid and always somewhat distant, he walked with a measured step toward the closest groups and extended his hand to us:
“Hello, I’m Carlos Martín.”
During that time I was fascinated by the lyrical prose pieces that Eduardo Carranza was publishing in the literary section of El Tiempo and in the magazine Sábado. I thought it was a genre inspired by Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Platero and I, popular with the young poets who aspired to wipe the myth of Guillermo Valencia off the face of the map. The poet Jorge Rojas, heir to an ephemeral fortune, sponsored with his name and money the publication of some original chapbooks that aroused great interest in his generation, and unified a group of good, well-known poets.
This was a profound change in domestic relations. The spectral image of the former rector was replaced by a concrete presence who maintained the proper distance but was always within reach. He did away with the routine inspection of our personal grooming and other useless regulations, and at times he would converse with students during the nighttime recreational period.
The new style set me on my path. Perhaps Calderón had spoken about me to the new rector, because on one of the first nights he probed in an oblique way into my relationship to poetry, and I let out everything I had inside. He asked me if I had read The Literary Experience, a book by Don Alfonso Reyes that had been the subject of much discussion. I confessed that I had not, and he brought it to me the next day. I devoured half of it under cover of my desk in three successive classes, and the rest at recreation periods on the soccer field. It made me happy that so prestigious an essayist would take the time to study the songs of Agustín Lara as if they were poems by Garcilaso, with the pretext of an ingenious phrase: “The popular songs of Agustín Lara are not popular songs.”* For me it was like finding poetry dissolved into the soup of daily life.
Martín gave up the magnificent apartment in the rectory. He installed his office with open doors in the main courtyard, and this brought him even closer to our conversations after supper. He moved with his wife and children, intending to stay, into a well-maintained colonial mansion on a corner of the main square, with a study whose walls were lined with all the books a reader attentive to the renovative tastes of those years could dream of. On weekends his friends from Bogotá would visit him there, in particular his comrades from Stone and Sky. One Sunday I had to go to his house with Guillermo López Guerra on an errand, and Eduardo Carranza and Jorge Rojas, the two great stars, were there. With a rapid gesture the rector had us sit down so we would not interrupt the conversation, and we were there for half an hour without understanding a word because they were discussing a book by Paul Valéry, whom we had not even heard of. I had seen Carranza more than once in bookstores and cafés in Bogotá, and I would have been able to identify him just by the timbre and fluidity of his voice, which corresponded to his casual clothes and way of being: a poet. On the other hand, I could not have identified Jorge Rojas because of his ministerial attire and style until Carranza addressed him by name. I longed to be present at a discussion about poetry among three of the greatest, but it did not happen. When they had finished with their subject, the rector put his hand on my shoulder and said to his guests:
“This is a great poet.”
He said it as a courtesy, of course, but I felt struck by lightning. Carlos Martín insisted on taking our picture with the two great poets, and he did, in fact, but I knew nothing more about it until half a century later in his house on the Catalan coast, where he retired to enjoy his honorable old age.
The liceo was shaken by a renovatory wind. The radio, which we had used only for dancing with one another, was transformed under Carlos Martín into an instrument for disseminating information, and for the first time the evening news was listened to and discussed in the recreational courtyard. Cultural activity increased with the creation of a literary center and the publication of a newspaper. When we made up a list of possible candidates based on their well-defined literary interests, the number gave us the name: the literary center of the Thirteen. It seemed a stroke of luck as well because it challenged superstition. The initiative came from the students themselves, and it consisted simply in our meeting once a week to talk about literature, though in reality that was all we did in our free time, both in and out of school. Each of us brought his own writing, read it, and submitted it to the judgment of the rest. Astounded by that example, I contributed the reading of sonnets that I had signed with the pseudonym Javier Garcés, which I used not to distinguish myself but only to hide. They were simple technical exercises without inspiration or aspiration, to which I attributed no poetic value because they did not come from my soul. I had begun with imitations of Quevedo, Lope de Vega, and even García Lorca, whose octosyllables were so spontaneous that it was enough just to begin in order to continue through inertia. I went so far in that fever of imitation that I set myself the task of parodying in order each of Garcilaso de la Vega’s forty sonnets. I also wrote ones that some students requested so they could claim them as their own when they gave them to their Sunday girlfriends. One of the girls, in absolute secrecy, was very moved when she read me the verses her suitor had dedicated to her as if he had written them himself.
Carlos Martín gave us a small storeroom in the school’s second courtyard, its windows sealed for security. There were about five of us who would give ourselves assignments for the next meeting. None of them had set writing as a career, though it was not a question of that but of testing each person’s possibilities. We discussed the works of the other members and began to anger one another as if the meetings were soccer matches. One day Ricardo González Ripoll had to leave in the middle of a debate and surprised the rector with his ear at the door, listening to the discussion. His curiosity was legitimate because it did not seem credible to him that we would dedicate our free hours to literature.
Toward the end of March we heard the news that the former rector, Don Alejandro Ramos, had pu
t a bullet through his head in the Parque Nacional in Bogotá. No one was willing to attribute this to his solitary and perhaps depressive character, and no one could find a reasonable motive for his committing suicide behind the monument to General Rafael Uribe Uribe, a fighter in four civil wars and a Liberal politician who was assassinated with an ax by two fanatics in the atrium of the Capitolio. A delegation from the liceo headed by the new rector attended the funeral of Maestro Alejandro Ramos, who remained in everyone’s memory as the farewell to another time.
Interest in national politics was rather thin at school. In my grandparents’ house I had heard it said too often that the only difference between the two parties after the War of a Thousand Days was that the Liberals went to five o’clock Mass so that no one would see them and the Conservatives went to Mass at eight so that people would believe they were believers. Still, the real differences began to be felt again thirty years later, when the Conservative Party lost power and the first Liberal presidents tried to open the country to the new winds blowing in the world. The Conservative Party, defeated by the rust of its absolute power, ordered and cleaned its own house under the distant brilliance of Mussolini in Italy and the dark shadows of General Franco in Spain, while the first administration of President Alfonso López Pumarejo, with a pleiad of well-educated young men, had tried to create the conditions for a modern liberalism, perhaps not realizing that he was carrying out the historic fatalism of splitting us into the two halves into which the world was divided. It was unavoidable. In one of the books the teachers lent us I found a citation attributed to Lenin: “If you do not become involved in politics, politics will eventually become involved in you.”
But after forty-six years of a reactionary hegemony of Conservative presidents, peace began to seem possible. Three young presidents with modern ways of thinking had opened a liberal perspective that seemed ready to dissipate the mists of the past. Alfonso López Pumarejo, the most notable of the three, and a bold reformer, was reelected in 1942 for a second term, and nothing seemed to disturb the rhythm of the changing of the guard. So that in my first year at the liceo we were absorbed in the news of the European war, which kept us in suspense as national politics never had. Newspapers did not come into the school except in very special circumstances, because we were not in the habit of thinking about the press. Portable radios did not exist, and the only radio in the liceo was the old console in the teachers’ room that we played at full volume at seven in the evening in order to dance. We were far from thinking that the bloodiest and most turbulent of all our wars was incubating at that very moment.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 23
