We never found out how Papá had learned its origin, or why he had pretended to ignore his son’s shabby trick, but the boy disappeared from the house until my mother had calmed her husband. That was when we heard Papá’s first threats to send Luis Enrique to the reformatory in Medellín, but no one paid attention to him, for he had also announced his intention to send me to the seminary at Ocaña, not to punish me for anything but for the honor of having a priest in the house, and it took him longer to conceive the idea than to forget it. The tiple, however, was the last straw.
Admission to the house of correction was possible only by the decision of a judge for juveniles, but Papá overcame the lack of this requirement with a letter of recommendation from the archbishop of Medellín, Monsignor García Benítez, obtained through the mediation of mutual friends. Luis Enrique, for his part, gave yet another demonstration of his good nature and allowed himself to be taken away, as jubilant as if he were going to a party.
Vacation without him was not the same. He could accompany Filadelfo Velilla, the magical tailor and masterful tiple player, like a professional, and Maestro Valdés, of course. It was easy. When we left those rousing dances of the rich, flocks of furtive apprentice birds would assail us in the shadows of the park with all kinds of temptations. By mistake I proposed to one who passed close by, but who was not one of them, that she come with me, and she responded with exemplary logic that she could not because her husband was sleeping at home. But two nights later she told me she would leave the street door unbarred three times a week so I could come in without knocking when her husband was not there.
I remember her first name and family names, but I prefer to call her what I called her then: Nigromanta, or Necromancer. She would turn twenty at Christmas, and she had an Abyssinian profile and cocoa skin. Her bed was joyful and her orgasms rocky and agonized, and she had an instinct for love that seemed to belong more to a turbulent river than to a human being. Beginning with the first assault we went mad in bed. Her husband—like Juan Breva—had the body of a giant and the voice of a little girl. He had been a police officer in the south of the country, and he brought with him a bad reputation for killing Liberals just to keep up his marksmanship. They lived in a room divided by a cardboard partition, with a door to the street and another to the cemetery. The neighbors complained that she disturbed the peace of the dead with her howls of a happy dog, but the louder she howled the happier the dead must have been to be disturbed by her.
During the first week I had to escape the room at four in the morning because we had confused the date and the officer could come in at any moment. I went out by the door to the cemetery, among will-o’-the-wisps and the barking of necrophiliac dogs. On the second bridge across the channel I saw a huge shape coming toward me that I did not recognize until we had passed. It was the sergeant in person, who would have found me in his house if I had left five minutes later.
“Good morning, white boy,” he said in a cordial tone.
I answered without conviction:
“God keep you, Sergeant.”
Then he stopped to ask me for a light. I gave it to him, standing very close to protect the match from the early-morning wind. When he moved away with his cigarette lit, he said in a good-humored way:
“You have a stink of whore on you that’s really awful.”
My fear lasted less time than I had expected, because the following Wednesday I fell asleep again and when I opened my eyes I found my injured rival contemplating me in silence from the foot of the bed. My terror was so intense that it was difficult for me to continue breathing. She, who was naked, too, tried to place herself between us, but her husband moved her away with the barrel of his revolver.
“You stay out of this,” he said. “Cheating in bed is settled with lead.”
He put the revolver on the table, opened a bottle of cane rum, put it next to the revolver, and we sat facing each other to drink without speaking. I could not imagine what he was going to do, but I thought that if he wanted to kill me he would have done it already without all the rigamarole. A short while later Nigromanta appeared, wrapped in a sheet and with a festive air, but he pointed the revolver at her.
“This is men’s business,” he told her.
She gave a start and hid behind the partition.
We had finished the first bottle when the storm broke. He opened the second, pressed the muzzle against his temple, and stared at me with ice-cold eyes. Then he squeezed the trigger hard, but it clicked. He could not control the trembling of his hand when he gave me the revolver.
“It’s your turn,” he said.
It was the first time I had held a revolver, and I was surprised that it was so heavy and warm. I did not know what to do. I was soaked in glacial sweat, and my belly was full of a burning foam. I tried to say something but had no voice. It did not occur to me to shoot him, but I returned the revolver to him without realizing it was my only chance.
“What, did you shit yourself?” he asked with a joyful contempt. “You might have thought about that before you came here.”
I could have told him that even machos shit, but I realized I did not have the balls for fatal jokes. Then he opened the cylinder of the revolver, took out the only cartridge, and threw it on the table: it was empty. What I felt was not relief but a terrible humiliation.
The rainstorm eased before four o’clock. We both were so exhausted by tension that I cannot remember at what moment he ordered me to dress, and I obeyed with a certain mournful solemnity. Only when he sat down again did I realize that he was the one who was crying. In abundance, without shame, almost as if he were showing off his tears. At last he wiped them away with the back of his hand, blew his nose with his fingers, and stood up.
“Do you know why you’re leaving here alive?” he asked. And he answered his own question: “Because your papá was the only one who cured me of a case of the clap that nobody else could take care of for three years.”
He gave me a man’s pat on my back and pushed me into the street. It was still raining, and the town was flooded, so I walked along the stream in water up to my knees, astounded at being alive.
I do not know how my mother learned about the confrontation, but in the days that followed she undertook an insistent campaign to keep me from leaving the house at night. In the meantime, she treated me as she would have treated Papá, with distracted methods that did little good. She looked for signs that I had taken off my clothes outside the house, she discovered traces of perfume where none existed, she prepared heavy meals for me before I went out, following the popular superstition that her husband and sons would not dare make love during the sluggishness of digestion. At last, one night when she had no more pretexts for holding me, she sat in front of me and said:
“They’re saying you’re involved with the wife of a policeman and he’s sworn he’ll shoot you.”
I managed to convince her it was not true, but the rumor persisted. Nigromanta sent word that she was alone, that her man was on an assignment, that she had not seen him for a long time. I always did everything possible not to run into him, but he would hurry to greet me from a distance with a gesture that could have been either a sign of reconciliation or of menace. During vacation the following year I saw him for the last time, on a drunken night when he offered me a drink of brutal rum I did not dare refuse.
I do not know by what conjuring arts my teachers and classmates, who had always viewed me as introverted, began to see me in the fifth year as a poete maudit, heir to the informal atmosphere that had thrived during the time of Carlos Martín. Was it in order to be more like that image that I began to smoke in the liceo when I was fifteen? My first attempt was horrible. I spent half the night agonizing in my own vomit on the bathroom floor. In the morning I was exhausted, but my tobacco hangover, instead of repelling me, provoked an irresistible desire to keep smoking. This was how I started my life as a diehard tobacco addict, to the point where I could not think of a sentence if my mouth was not
full of smoke. At the liceo smoking was permitted only during recess, but I asked permission to go to the bathroom two and three times in each class, just to stave off the craving. I began smoking three packs of twenty cigarettes a day, and went up to four depending on the wildness of the night. Once, when I was already out of school, I thought I would go mad because of the dryness of my throat and the pain in my bones. I decided to give it up but could stand no more than two days of longing.
I do not know if this was what freed my hand in the prose of Professor Calderón’s assignments, which grew more and more daring, and in the books of literary theory that he almost forced me to read. Today, as I review my life, I remember that my conception of the story was elementary despite the many I had read since I was first astonished by The Thousand and One Nights. I even dared to think that the marvels recounted by Scheherazade really happened in the daily life of her time, and stopped happening because of the incredulity and realistic cowardice of subsequent generations. By the same token, it seemed impossible that anyone from our time would ever believe again that you could fly over cities and mountains on a carpet, or that a slave from Cartagena de Indias would live for two hundred years in a bottle as a punishment, unless the author of the story could make his readers believe it.
I found classes tedious, except for literature—which I memorized—and in them I played a unique role. Bored with studying, I left everything to the mercy of chance. I had a natural instinct for predicting the important points in each subject, almost guessing the ones that most interested the teachers in order not to study the rest. The reality is that I did not understand why I had to sacrifice my talents and my time on courses that did not move me and therefore would be of no use to me in a life that was not mine.
I have dared to think that most of my teachers graded me more for my nature than my exams. What saved me were my unexpected answers, my lunatic notions, my irrational inventions. When I finished the fifth year, however, with academic shocks I did not feel capable of overcoming, I became aware of my limitations. Until then the baccalaureate had been a road paved with miracles, but my heart warned me that at the end of the fifth year an insurmountable wall was waiting for me. The unadorned truth is that I lacked the will, the vocation, the orderliness, the money, and the orthography to embark on an academic career. In other words: the years were flying by and I did not have the slightest idea what I was going to do with my life, for much more time would still have to go by before I realized that even that state of defeat was propitious, because there is nothing in this world or the next that is not useful to a writer.
Things were going no better for the country. Hounded by the fierce opposition of reactionary Conservatism, Alfonso López Pumarejo resigned the presidency of the Republic on July 31, 1945. He was succeeded by Alberto Lleras Camargo, appointed by Congress to complete the last year of the presidential term. Starting with the speech he gave when he assumed office, with his soothing voice and elegant prose style, Lleras began the illusory task of moderating tempers in the country for the election of the next officeholder.
Through the intercession of Monsignor López Lleras, the new president’s cousin, the rector of the liceo obtained a special audience to request help from the government for a study trip to the Atlantic coast. I never knew why the rector chose me to accompany him to the audience on the condition that I arrange my disheveled hair and unruly mustache just a little. The other guests were Guillermo López Guerra, a friend of the president’s, and Álvaro Ruiz Torres, the nephew of Laura Victoria, a famous poet of bold themes in the generation of Los Nuevos—the New Ones—to which Lleras Camargo also belonged. I had no alternative: on Saturday night, while Guillermo Granados read a novel that had nothing to do with my case to the dormitory, an apprentice barber in the third year gave me a recruit’s haircut and carved out a tango mustache for me. For the rest of the week I endured the teasing of boarders and day students because of my new style. The mere idea of entering the Palacio Presidencial froze my blood, but my heart was mistaken because the only sign of the mysteries of power that we found there was a celestial silence. After a short wait in an anteroom with tapestries and satin curtains, a uniformed soldier led us to the office of the president.
Lleras Camargo’s appearance had little in common with his portraits. I was struck by his triangular shoulders in an impeccable suit of English gabardine, his prominent cheekbones, his parchmentlike pallor, his teeth like those of a mischievous boy which were the delight of caricaturists, the slowness of his gestures, and his way of shaking hands and looking right into your eyes. I do not remember what idea I had of what presidents were like, but it did not seem to me that they were all like him. In time, when I knew him better, I realized that perhaps he himself never knew that, more than anything else, he was a writer gone astray.
After listening to the rector’s words with too obvious an attention, he made some opportune comments but did not decide until he had also heard from the three students. He listened with the same attention, and it flattered us to be treated with the same respect and courtesy as the rector. The final two minutes were enough for us to be certain that he knew more about poetry than about river navigation and no doubt found it more interesting.
He granted everything we asked for, and also promised to attend the liceo’s closing ceremonies for the year, four months later. He did, as if they were the most serious government proceedings, and he laughed more than anyone at the farcical play we put on in his honor. At the final reception he enjoyed himself as if he were a student, an image different from his own, and he did not resist the studentlike temptation of putting his leg in the way of the one serving drinks, who just managed to avoid it.
In the festive mood of graduation celebrations, I went to spend fifth-year vacation with the family, and the first thing they told me was the very happy news that my brother Luis Enrique was back after a year and six months in the house of correction. Once again I was surprised by his good nature. He did not feel the slightest resentment against anyone for his sentence, and he recounted his misfortunes with invincible humor. In his meditations during confinement he reached the conclusion that our parents had imprisoned him in good faith. But the bishop’s protection did not save him from the hard trials of daily life in prison, which instead of corrupting him enriched his character and his good sense of humor.
His first job when he returned was that of secretary to the mayor of Sucre. A short while the mayor suffered a sudden gastric upset, and someone recommended a magical remedy that had just come on the market: Alka-Seltzer. The mayor did not dissolve it in water but swallowed it like an ordinary pill, and through some miracle he did not choke on the uncontrollable effervescence in his stomach. Not yet recovered from the shock, he prescribed a few days’ rest for himself, but he had political reasons for not having any of his legitimate deputies substitute for him, and he gave interim authority to my brother. Through that strange turn of events—and not having reached the prescribed age—Luis Enrique went down in the history of the city as the youngest mayor.
The only thing that really disturbed me during this vacation was the certainty that in the depths of their hearts my family was basing their future on what they were hoping for from me, and only I knew with certainty that these were vain illusions. Two or three casual remarks of my father’s halfway through the meal indicated to me that there was much to say about our common fate, and my mother hurried to confirm this. “If things go on this way,” she said, “sooner or later we’ll have to go back to Cataca.” But a rapid glance from my father induced her to correct that:
“Or wherever we go.”
Then it was clear: the possibility of a new move anywhere was a topic that had already been introduced in the family, not because of the moral atmosphere but in order to find a larger future for the children. Until that moment I had consoled myself with the idea of attributing to the city and its people, and even to my family, the spirit of defeat I suffered from myself. But my father’s drama
revealed once again that it is always possible to find someone who is guilty so you do not have to take the blame.
What I perceived in the air was something much more dense. My mother seemed to care only about the health of Jaime, her youngest, who had not managed to overcome his premature birth. She spent most of the day lying with him in her bedroom hammock, oppressed by sadness and humiliating heat, and the house began to resent her neglect. My brothers and sisters seemed to have no supervision. The order of our meals had relaxed so much that we ate without schedule whenever we were hungry. My father, the most home-loving of men, spent the day contemplating the square from the pharmacy and the evenings playing idle games at the billiard club. One day I could not bear the tension any longer. I lay down next to my mother in the hammock, as I had not been able to do when I was a child, and asked her what the mystery was that we were breathing in along with the air in the house. She swallowed an entire sigh so that her voice would not tremble and opened her heart to me:
“Your papá has a son by another woman.”
From the relief I detected in her voice I realized the disquiet with which she had been waiting for my question. She had discovered the truth through the clairvoyance of jealousy, when a young maid came home filled with excitement because she had seen Papá talking on the phone in the telegraph office. A jealous woman did not need to know anything else. It was the one telephone in town, employed only for long-distance calls arranged ahead of time, and it had uncertain delays and minutes so expensive that it was used only in cases of extreme gravity. Each call, no matter how simple, aroused a malicious alarm in the community of the square. And so when Papá came home my mother watched him without saying anything to him, until he tore up a piece of paper he was carrying in his pocket that was the announcement of a judicial complaint because of professional abuse. My mother waited for the chance to ask him point-blank whom he had been talking to on the telephone. The question was so revealing that my papá could not find an immediate answer more credible than the truth:
Living to Tell the Tale Page 25
