Politics forced its way into the liceo. We divided into groups of Liberals and Conservatives, and for the first time we knew which side each person was on. An internal militancy arose, cordial and somewhat academic at first, but it degenerated into the same state of mind that was beginning to rot the country. The first tensions at school were almost imperceptible, but no one doubted the good influence of Carlos Martín at the head of a faculty of teachers who had never hidden their ideologies. If the new rector was not an obvious militant, he at least authorized listening to the evening news on the radio in the teachers’ room, and from then on political news prevailed over dance music. It was said without confirmation that in his office he had a portrait either of Lenin or of Marx.
The only threat of riot that ever took place at the liceo must have been the fruit of that rarefied atmosphere. In the dormitory pillows and shoes flew to the detriment of reading and sleep. I have not been able to establish the motive, but I think I remember—and several classmates agree with me—that it was because of an episode in the book being read aloud that night: Cantaclaro, by Rómulo Gallegos. A strange call to combat.
Summoned for an emergency, Carlos Martín came into the dormitory and walked from one end to the other several times in the immense silence caused by his appearance. Then, in an attack of authoritarianism unusual in a character like his, he ordered us to leave the dormitory in pajamas and slippers and assemble in the icy courtyard. There he delivered an oration in the circular style of Catiline, and we returned in perfect order and went back to sleep. It was the only incident of the kind that I can remember in our years at the liceo.
Mario Convers, a student who had entered the sixth-year class that year, kept us in a state of excitement with the idea of creating a newspaper different from the conventional ones in other schools. One of his first contacts was with me, and he seemed so convincing that I agreed, flattered but with no clear idea of my function, to be his editor-in-chief. Final preparations for the paper coincided with the arrest of President López Pumarejo on July 8, 1944, by a group of high-ranking officers in the Armed Forces, while he was on an official visit in the south of the country. The story, as he himself recounted it, was spare and to the point. Perhaps without intending to, he had told a stupendous tale to the investigators, according to which he had not known what had happened until he was freed. It was so close to the truths of real life that the Pasto coup became one more of many absurd episodes in our national history.
Alberto Lleras Camargo, in his position as first deputy, lulled the country with his perfect voice and diction for several hours on Radio Nacional until President López was freed and order was reestablished. But rigorous martial law, with censorship of the press, was imposed. The prognosis was uncertain. The Conservatives had governed the country from the time of our independence from Spain, in 1830, until the election of Olaya Herrera a century later, and they still gave no sign of liberalizing. The Liberals, on the other hand, were becoming more and more conservative in a country that was leaving scraps of itself behind in its history. At that moment they had an elite of young intellectuals fascinated by the lure of power, whose most radical and viable example was Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. He had been one of the heroes of my childhood because of his actions against repression in the banana zone, which I had heard about, without understanding them, ever since I gained the use of my reason. My grandmother admired him, but I believe she was concerned by his similarities at the time to the Communists. I had stood behind him when he gave a thundering speech from a balcony overlooking the square in Zipaquirá, and I was struck by his melon-shaped skull, the straight coarse hair and complexion of a pure Indian, his booming voice with its accent of the street urchins in Bogotá, perhaps exaggerated for political reasons. In his speech he did not talk about Liberals and Conservatives or the exploiters and the exploited, like everyone else, but about the poor and the oligarchs, a word I heard then for the first time as it was hammered into every sentence, and I hurried to look it up in the dictionary.
He was a distinguished lawyer, an outstanding pupil in Rome of the great Italian penologist Enrico Ferri. He had studied the oratorical arts of Mussolini there, and on the rostrum he had something of his theatrical style. Gabriel Turbay, his rival in the party, was an educated and elegant physician, with thin gold-rimmed glasses that gave him a certain air of a movie actor. At a recent Communist Party congress he had delivered an unexpected speech that surprised many and disturbed some of his middle-class party colleagues, but he did not believe he was contradicting by word or deed either his liberal formation or his aristocratic vocation. His familiarity with Russian diplomacy dated from 1936, when in his role as Colombian ambassador to Italy he established relations in Rome with the Soviet Union. Seven years later he formalized them in Washington as Colombian minister to the United States.
His relations with the Soviet embassy in Bogotá were very cordial, and he had some friends in the leadership of the Colombian Communist Party who would have been able to establish an electoral alliance with the Liberals, something often talked about in those days but never realized. During that period as well, when he was ambassador in Washington, an insistent rumor circulated in Colombia that he was the secret lover of a great Hollywood star—perhaps Joan Crawford or Paulette Goddard—but he also never renounced his career as an uncorruptible bachelor.
The supporters of Gaitán and of Turbay together could have formed a Liberal majority and opened new directions within the party itself, but neither of the two separate halves could defeat a united and armed Conservatism.
Our Gaceta Literaria appeared during those evil days. Even those of us who had already printed the first issue were surprised by its professional presentation as a well-formatted and well-printed eight-page tabloid. Carlos Martín and Carlos Julio Calderón were the most enthusiastic, and during recreation periods both of them commented on some of the articles. The most important of them was one written by Carlos Martín at our request, in which he established the need for a courageous awareness of the struggle against those who peddled the interests of the state, the ambitious politicians and speculators who interfered with the free progress of the country. It was published with a large photograph of him on the first page. There was an article by Convers about Hispanicism, and a lyrical prose piece by me and signed Javier Garcés. Convers announced that his friends in Bogotá were very enthusiastic, and there were possibilities for subventions to launch it on a large scale as an interscholastic paper.
The first issue had not yet been distributed when the Pasto coup took place. On the same day that a breakdown of public order was declared, the mayor of Zipaquirá burst into the liceo at the head of an armed squad and confiscated the copies we had ready for circulation. It was a cinematic assault, explainable only as the result of a calculated denunciation that the newspaper contained subversive material. That same day notification came from the press office of the presidency of the Republic stating that the paper had been printed without undergoing the censorship required by martial law, and Carlos Martín was stripped of the rectorship with no prior notification.
For us it was a nonsensical decision that made us feel humiliated and important at the same time. The print run was no more than two hundred copies, intended for distribution among friends, but they told us that the censorship requirement was unavoidable under martial law. Our license was canceled until the issuance of a new order that never arrived.
More than fifty years went by before Carlos Martín revealed to me, for these memoirs, the mysteries of that absurd episode. On the day the Gaceta was confiscated, the same education minister who had appointed him—Antonio Rocha—called him to his office in Bogotá to request his resignation. Carlos Martín found him with a copy of the Gaceta Literaria in which numerous phrases considered subversive had been underlined in red pencil. The same had been done to his editorial, and the one by Mario Convers, and even a poem by a known author that was suspected of being written in code. “Even the Bible un
derlined in that malicious way could express the opposite of its authentic meaning,” Carlos Martín told him with so much blatant fury that the minister threatened to call the police. He was named publisher of the magazine Sábado, which for an intellectual like him should have been considered a stellar promotion. But he always had the impression that he had been the victim of a right-wing conspiracy. He was the object of an attack in a Bogotá café that he almost repelled with a gun. A new minister later named him chief counsel of the judicial section, and he had a brilliant career that culminated in a retirement surrounded by books and memories in his oasis in Tarragona.
At the same time that Carlos Martín was removed—with no connection to him, of course—an anonymous story made the rounds of the liceo and the houses and taverns of the city, according to which the war with Peru, in 1932, was a deception of the Liberal governor to stay in power despite the unrestrained opposition of the Conservatives. The story, which was even distributed on mimeographed sheets, claimed that the drama had begun without the slightest political intention when a Peruvian second lieutenant crossed the Amazon River with a military patrol and on the Colombian side kidnapped the secret girlfriend of the intendant of Leticia, an exciting mulatta called Pila, a diminutive of Pilar. When the Colombian intendant discovered the abduction he crossed that natural frontier with a group of armed peons and rescued Pila on Peruvian territory. But General Luis Sánchez Cerro, the dictator of Peru, took advantage of the dispute to invade Colombia and attempt to change the Amazonian boundaries in favor of his country.
Olaya Herrera—under the ferocious hounding of the Conservative Party that had been defeated after half a century of absolute rule—declared a state of war, established a national mobilization, purged the army and put in men he trusted, and sent troops to liberate the territories violated by the Peruvians. A battle cry shook the country and fired our childhood: “Long live Colombia, down with Peru!” In the paroxysm of the war the rumor circulated that civilian airplanes from SCADTA were militarized and armed as fighting squadrons, and that one of them, lacking bombs, dispersed a Holy Week procession in the Peruvian town of Guepí with a bombardment of coconuts. The great writer Juan Lozano y Lozano, called upon by President Olaya to keep him informed of the truth in a war of reciprocal lies, wrote the truth of the incident in his masterful prose, but the false version was considered valid for a long time.
General Sánchez Cerro, of course, found a golden opportunity in the war to strengthen his iron regime. For his part, Olaya Herrera named as commander of the Colombian forces a Conservative general, Alfredo Vásquez Cobo, who happened to be in Paris. The general crossed the Atlantic in an armed ship and penetrated the mouths of the Amazon River all the way to Leticia, when the diplomats on both sides had already begun to extinguish the war.
With no connection at all to the Pasto coup or the incident of the newspaper, Carlos Martín was replaced as rector by Oscar Espitia Brand, a career educator and eminent physicist. The appointment aroused all kinds of suspicions in the school. I was shaken by reservations about him from our first greeting because of the absolute astonishment with which he stared at my poet’s mane and untamed mustache. He had a hard face, and he looked straight into your eyes with a severe expression. The news that he would be our teacher of organic chemistry made my fear complete.
One Saturday during that year we were at the movies, in the middle of an evening show, when an agitated voice announced over the loudspeakers that a student at the liceo had died. This made so great an impression that I have not been able to remember what film we were watching, but I never forgot the intensity of Claudette Colbert about to throw herself into a torrential river from the railing of a bridge. The dead student, seventeen years old, was in the second year and had just arrived from his remote city of Pasto, near the border with Ecuador. He had suffered respiratory failure in the course of a run organized by the gym teacher as a weekend penance for his lazy students. It was the only instance of a student dying for any reason during my stay, and it caused great consternation not only in the liceo but in the city as well. My classmates chose me to say a few words of farewell at the funeral. That same night I requested an appointment with the new rector in order to show him my speech, and going into his office shook me like a supernatural repetition of the only interview I’d had with the late rector. Maestro Espitia read my manuscript with a tragic expression, and he approved it without comment, but when I stood to leave he indicated that I should sit down again. He had read notes and verses of mine, some of the many that circulated in secret during recreational periods, and he had thought a few of them deserved to be published in a literary supplement. I was just attempting to overcome my pitiless timidity when he expressed what was beyond a doubt his real purpose. He advised me to cut my poet’s curls, inappropriate in a serious man, trim my bushy mustache, and stop wearing shirts with birds and flowers on them that were better suited to Carnival. I never expected anything like that, and to my good fortune I was too nervous to respond with an impertinence. He noticed this and adopted a sacramental tone to explain his fear that my style would be adopted by the younger students because of my reputation as a poet. I left the office affected by the recognition of my poetic customs and talent at so high a level, and disposed to satisfy the rector with a change in my appearance for so solemn a ceremony. To the point where I interpreted as a personal failure the cancellation of posthumous tributes at the request of the boy’s family.
The ending was sinister. When the casket was on view in the school library, someone discovered that the glass looked foggy. Álvaro Ruiz Torres opened the casket at the request of the family and confirmed that it was, in fact, damp inside. Searching by touch for the cause of vapor in a sealed coffin, he applied light pressure to the chest with his fingertips and the corpse emitted a heartrending lament. The family was horrified at the idea that he was alive until the doctor explained that the lungs had retained air because of respiratory failure and had expelled it with pressure on the chest. Despite the simplicity of the diagnosis, or perhaps for that very reason, some were still afraid he had been buried alive. In that frame of mind, I left for my fourth-year vacation, longing to soften up my parents so I would not have to go on with my studies.
I disembarked in Sucre under an invisible drizzle. The retaining wall at the port seemed different from the one in my memory. The square was smaller and barer than I recalled, and the church and promenade had a forsaken light under the pruned almond trees. The colored wreaths on the streets announced Christmas, but this did not awaken in me the emotion it once had, and I did not recognize any of the handful of men with umbrellas waiting on the dock, until one of them said as I passed, in an unmistakable accent and tone:
“What’s the story?”
It was my papá, somewhat worn and pale from loss of weight. He was not wearing the white linen suit that had identified him from a distance ever since he was a young man, but a pair of house trousers, a short-sleeved tropical shirt, and a strange overseer’s hat. He was accompanied by my brother Gustavo, whom I did not recognize because of his nine-year-old growth spurt.
It was fortunate that the family had retained the enterprising spirit of the poor, and the early supper seemed to have been prepared with the intention of letting me know that this was my house and there was no other. The good news at the table was that my sister Ligia had won the lottery. The story—which she told herself—began when our mother dreamed that her papá had fired a gun into the air to frighten away a thief he caught robbing the old house in Aracataca. My mother recounted the dream at breakfast, following a family custom, and suggested that they buy a lottery ticket ending in seven, because the number had the same shape as my grandfather’s revolver. Their luck failed with a ticket my mother bought on credit, planning to pay for it with the prize money. But Ligia, who was eleven at the time, asked Papá for thirty centavos to pay for the ticket that did not win, and another thirty so that the following week she could play the same peculiar number ag
ain: 0207.
Our brother Luis Enrique hid the ticket to frighten Ligia, but his fright was greater the following Monday, when he heard her come into the house shouting like a madwoman that she had won the lottery. In his haste to do his mischief, our brother forgot where the ticket was, and in the confusion of the search, they had to empty closets and trunks and turn the house upside down from the living room to the toilets. But most disquieting of all was the cabalistic amount of the prize: 770 pesos.
The bad news was that my parents had at last realized their dream of sending Luis Enrique to the Fontidueño Reformatory in Medellín, convinced it was a school for disobedient children and not what it was in reality: a prison for the rehabilitation of very dangerous juvenile delinquents.
Papá made the final decision when he sent his wayward son to collect a bill owed to the pharmacy, and instead of handing over the eight pesos that they paid him, he bought a good-quality tiple that he learned to play like a master. My father made no comment when he discovered the instrument in the house, and he continued asking his son to collect the debt, but he always answered that the shopkeeper did not have the money to pay. Some two months had gone by when Luis Enrique found Papá accompanying himself on the tiple as he sang an improvised song: “Look at me, here I am, playing a tiple that cost me eight pesos.”
Living to Tell the Tale Page 24
