It was a good period for the liceo, and the least promising one for the country. Lleras’s impartiality, without intending to, increased the tension that was beginning to be felt for the first time at the school. Today, however, I realize that it was already inside me, but only then did I begin to be aware of the country in which I lived. Some teachers who had tried to remain impartial for the past year could not manage it in their classes, and they would let loose with indigestible outbursts about their political preferences. In particular when the hard campaign for the presidential succession began.
Each day it was more evident that with Gaitán and Turbay running at the same time, the Liberal Party would lose the presidency of the Republic after twenty-five years of absolute governments. They were two candidates as inimical as if they were from two different parties, not only for their own sins but because of the bloody determination of the Conservatives, who had seen the situation with clarity since the first day: instead of Laureano Gómez, they imposed the candidacy of Ospina Pérez, a millionaire engineer with a well-deserved reputation as a patriarch. With Liberalism divided and Conservatism united and armed, there was no alternative: Ospina Pérez was elected.
Then Laureano Gómez began to prepare to succeed him by using official forces with all-out violence. It was a return to the historic reality of the nineteenth century, when we had no peace but only ephemeral truces between eight general civil wars and fourteen local ones, three military coups, and then the War of a Thousand Days, which left some eighty thousand dead on both sides in a population of four million people. It was so simple: it was all a common plan for regressing a hundred years.
Professor Giraldo, at the end of the year, made a flagrant exception for me that I am still ashamed of. He prepared a simple set of questions for me so I could make up the algebra I had failed since my fourth year, and he left me alone in the faculty office with all the opportunities for cheating within reach. He returned an hour later filled with hope, saw the catastrophic result, and canceled out each page with a cross from top to bottom and a ferocious growl: “That brain is rotted.” However, for the final grades, I passed algebra but had the decency not to thank the teacher for having gone against his principles and obligations for my sake.
The night before the last final exam of the year, Guillermo López Guerra and I had an unfortunate incident with Professor Gonzalo Ocampo because of a drunken fight. José Palencia had invited us to study in his hotel room, which was a colonial jewel with an idyllic view of the park in flower and the cathedral in the background. Since we had only one last exam, we stayed there until dark and returned to school by way of our poor men’s taverns. Professor Ocampo, on duty as prefect of discipline, reprimanded us on account of the hour and the state we were in, and the two of us in chorus crowned him with curses. His furious reaction and our shouts disturbed the dormitory.
The decision of the faculty was that López Guerra and I could not sit for the only final examination we still had to take. In other words: that year, at least, we would not hold baccalaureate degrees. We never could find out about the secret negotiations among the teachers, because they closed ranks with insurmountable solidarity. Rector Espitia must have assumed responsibility for the problem, and he arranged for us to take the exam at the Ministry of Education in Bogotá. Which we did. Espitia himself accompanied us, and stayed with us while we answered the written examination, which was graded on the spot. We did very well.
It must have been a very complicated internal situation, because Ocampo did not attend the final ceremony, perhaps because of Espitia’s easy solution and our excellent grades. And, in the end, because of my personal successes, for as a special prize I was awarded an unforgettable book: Diógenes Laercio’s Lives of Famous Philosophers. It not only was more than my parents expected, but I was also the first in that year’s class, though my classmates—and I more than anyone—knew I was not the best.
5
I NEVER IMAGINED that nine months after receiving the baccalaureate I would have my first story published in Fin de Semana, the literary supplement of El Espectador in Bogotá, and the most interesting and demanding of the time. Forty-two days later the second story was published. The most surprising thing for me, however, was a dedicatory note by the deputy editor of the paper and the editor of the supplement, Eduardo Zalamea Borda (Ulises), the most lucid Colombian critic at the time, and the one most alert to the appearance of new values.
The process was so unexpected that it is not easy to recount. At the beginning of the year I had matriculated in the faculty of law at the Universidad Nacional of Bogotá, as my parents and I had agreed. I lived in the very center of the city, in a pensión on Calle Florián, occupied for the most part by students from the Atlantic coast. On free afternoons, instead of working to support myself, I stayed in my room to read or went to the cafés that permitted it. They were books I obtained by chance and luck, and they depended more on chance than on any luck of mine, because the friends who could buy them lent them to me for such limited periods that I stayed awake for nights on end in order to return them on time. But unlike the ones I read at the liceo in Zipaquirá, which deserved to be in a mausoleum of consecrated authors, we read these like bread warm from the oven, printed in Buenos Aires in new translations after the long hiatus in publishing because of the Second World War. In this way I discovered, to my good fortune, the already very-much-discovered Jorge Luis Borges, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and Gilbert Chesterton, William Irish and Katherine Mansfield, and many others.
These new works were displayed in the unreachable windows of bookstores, but some copies circulated in the student cafés, which were active centers of cultural dissemination for university students from the provinces. Many of them had their places reserved year after year and received mail and even postal money orders there. Some favors from the owners, or their trusted employees, were decisive in saving a good many university careers. Numerous professionals in the country may owe more to them than to their invisible tutors.
I preferred El Molino, the café frequented by older poets, only some two hundred meters from my pensión and on the crucial corner of Avenida Jiménez de Quesada and Carrera Séptima. They did not allow students a fixed table, but you could be sure of learning more and learning it better than in textbooks from the literary conversations we listened to as we huddled at nearby tables. It was an enormous café, well turned out in the Spanish style, and its walls had been decorated by the painter Santiago Martínez Delgado with episodes from the battle of Don Quixote against the windmills. Although I did not have a reserved place, I always arranged for the waiters to put me as close as possible to the great master León de Greiff—bearded, gruff, charming—who would begin his tertulia* at dusk with some of the most famous writers of the day, and end it with his chess students at midnight, awash in cheap liquor. Very few of the great names in the country’s arts and letters did not sit at that table, and we played dead at ours in order not to miss a single word. Although they tended to talk more about women or political intrigues than about their art or work, they always said something new for us to learn. The most attentive of us were from the Atlantic coast, united less by Caribbean conspiracies against the Cachacos than by the vice of books. One day Jorge Álvaro Espinosa, a law student who had taught me to navigate the Bible and made me learn by heart the complete names of Job’s companions, placed an awesome tome on the table in front of me and declared with his bishop’s authority:
“This is the other Bible.”
It was, of course, James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I read in bits and pieces and fits and starts until I lost all patience. It was premature brashness. Years later, as a docile adult, I set myself the task of reading it again in a serious way, and it not only was the discovery of a genuine world that I never suspected inside me, but it also provided invaluable technical help to me in freeing language and in handling time and structures in my books.
One of my roommates was Domingo Manuel
Vega, a medical student who had been my friend ever since Sucre and who shared my voracity in reading. Another was my cousin Nicolás Ricardo, the oldest son of my uncle Juan de Dios, who kept alive for me the virtues of the family. One night Vega came in with three books he had just bought, and he lent me one chosen at random, as he often did to help me sleep. But this time the effect was just the opposite: I never again slept with my former serenity. The book was Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in the false translation by Borges published by Losada in Buenos Aires, that determined a new direction for my life from its first line, which today is one of the great devices in world literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” These were mysterious books whose dangerous precipices were not only different from but often contrary to everything I had known until then. It was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice. It was Scheherazade all over again, not in her millenary world where everything was possible but in another irreparable world where everything had already been lost.
When I finished reading The Metamorphosis I felt an irresistible longing to live in that alien paradise. The new day found me at the portable typewriter that Domingo Manuel Vega had lent me, attempting to write something that would resemble Kafka’s poor bureaucrat changed into an enormous cockroach. In the days that followed, I did not go to the university for fear the spell would be broken, and I continued sweating drops of envy until Eduardo Zalamea Borda published in his pages a disconsolate commentary lamenting the fact that the new generation of Colombian writers lacked memorable names, and that nothing could be detected in the future that might remedy the situation. I do not know with what right I felt challenged, in the name of my generation, by the provocation in that commentary, but I took up the abandoned story again in an attempt at rectification. I elaborated the plot idea of the conscious corpse in The Metamorphosis but relieved it of its false mysteries and ontological prejudices.
In any event, I felt so uncertain I did not dare talk it over with any of my tablemates. Not even with Gonzalo Mallarino, my fellow student at the faculty of law, who was the only reader of the lyrical prose pieces that I wrote to endure the tedium of my classes. I reread and corrected my story until I was exhausted, and at last I wrote a personal note to Eduardo Zalamea—whom I had never seen—of which I cannot recall even a single letter. I put everything in an envelope and brought it in person to reception at El Espectador. The concierge authorized me to go up to the second floor to hand the letter to Zalamea himself, but the mere idea paralyzed me. I left the envelope on the concierge’s desk and fled.
This happened on a Tuesday, and I was not troubled by any presentiments regarding the fate of my story, but I was certain that in the event it was published, it would not happen very soon. In the meantime, for two weeks I rambled and roamed from café to café to allay my Saturday-afternoon apprehension until September 13, when I went into El Molino and collided with the title of my story printed across the full width of El Espectador, which had just come out: “The Third Resignation.”
My first reaction was the devastating certainty that I did not have the five centavos to buy the paper. This was the most explicit symbol of my poverty, because many basic things in daily life, in addition to the newspaper, cost five centavos: the trolley, the public telephone, a cup of coffee, a shoeshine. I rushed out to the street with no protection against the imperturbable drizzle, but in the nearby cafés there was no one I knew to give me a charitable coin. And I did not find anyone in the pensión at that dead hour on Saturday except the landlady, which was the same as not finding anyone because I owed her seven hundred twenty times five centavos for two months of room and board. When I went out again, prepared for anything, I encountered a man who came from Divine Providence and was getting out of a cab, holding El Espectador in his hand, and I asked him straight out if he would give it to me.
And so I could read my first story in print, with an illustration by Hernán Merino, the official sketch artist for the paper. I read it hiding in my room, my heart pounding, in a single breath. In each line I was discovering the crushing power of print, for what I had constructed with so much love and pain as a humble parody of a universal genius was revealed to me as an obscure and weak monologue barely sustained by three or four consolatory sentences. Almost twenty years had to go by before I dared read it a second time, and my judgment then—not tempered by compassion—was much less indulgent.
The most difficult thing was the avalanche of glowing friends who invaded my room with copies of the newspaper and unrestrained praises for a story I was certain they had not understood. Among my fellow students at the university, some appreciated it, others had less understanding, still others with more reason did not go past the fourth line, but Gonzalo Mallarino, whose literary judgment it was not easy for me to place in doubt, approved it without reservation.
My greatest uneasiness had to do with the verdict of Jorge Álvaro Espinosa, whose critical blade was the most dangerous even beyond our immediate circle. I had contradictory feelings: I wanted to see him right away to resolve my uncertainty once and for all, but at the same time the idea of facing him terrified me. He disappeared until Tuesday, which was not strange in an insatiable reader, and when he reappeared in El Molino he began talking to me not about the story but about my audacity.
“I suppose you realize the trouble you’ve gotten into,” he said to me, fixing his green king-cobra eyes on mine. “Now you’re in the showcase of recognized writers, and there’s a lot you have to do to deserve it.”
I was petrified by the only opinion that could affect me as much as that of Ulises. But before he finished, I had decided to move ahead of him with what I considered then, and always considered since, to be the truth:
“That story is a piece of shit.”
He replied with immutable control that he could not say anything yet because he had only had time to glance at it. But he explained that even if it was as bad as I said, it was not bad enough to sacrifice the golden opportunity that life was offering me.
“In any case, that story already belongs to the past,” he concluded. “What matters now is the next one.”
He left me flabbergasted. I was foolish enough to look for contrary arguments until I became convinced I was not going to hear advice more intelligent than his. He expounded on his fixed idea that you first had to conceive of the story and then the style, but one depended on the other in a mutual servitude that was the magic wand of the classics. He spent some time on his opinion, repeated so often, that I needed to read the Greeks in a profound, unbiased way, and not only Homer, the only one I had read for the baccalaureate because I was obliged to. I promised I would, and I wanted to hear other names, but he changed the subject and began to talk about André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, which he had read that weekend. I never found the courage to tell him that perhaps our conversation had determined my life. I stayed up all night making notes for the next story, which would not have the meanders of the first one.
I suspected that those who talked to me about it were impressed not so much by the story—which perhaps they had not read and certainly had not understood—as by its being published in an unusual display on so important a page. To begin with, I realized that my two great defects were the two greatest defects: the clumsiness of my writing and my ignorance of the human heart. And they were more than evident in my first story, which was a confused, abstract meditation made worse by my abuse of invented emotions.
Searching my memory for situations from real life for the second story, I remembered that one of the most beautiful women I had known as a child told me that she wished she could be inside the very handsome cat that she was caressing on her lap. I asked her why, and she answered: “Because it is more beautiful than I am.” Then I had a point of departure for the second
story, and an attractive title: “Eva Is Inside Her Cat.” The rest, as in the previous story, was invented out of nothing, and for the same reason—as we liked to say in those days—both carried within them the seeds of their own destruction.
This story was published with the same display as the first, on Saturday, October 25, 1947, and illustrated by a rising star in the Caribbean sky, the painter Enrique Grau. I was struck that my friends accepted this as something routine for a renowned writer. I, on the other hand, suffered over the errors, doubted the successes, but managed to keep my hope alive. The high point came a few days later with a note published by Eduardo Zalamea employing his usual pseudonym, Ulises, in his daily column in El Espectador. It came straight to the point: “Readers of ‘Fin de Semana,’ the literary supplement of this newspaper, will have noted the appearance of a new and original talent with a vigorous personality.” And further on: “In the imagination everything can happen, but knowing how to show with naturalness, simplicity, and without fuss the pearl produced there is not something that all twenty-year-old boys just beginning their relationship with letters can accomplish.” And he concluded without hesitation: “With García Márquez a new and notable writer has been born.”
The note—how could it not!—brought a shock of happiness, but at the same time it disturbed me that Zalamea had not left himself any way out. Now everything was complete, and I had to interpret his generosity as a call to my conscience that would last the rest of my life. The note also revealed that Ulises had discovered my identity through one of his colleagues in the newsroom. That night I learned it had been through Gonzalo González, a close cousin to my closest cousins, who sat five meters from Eduardo Zalamea’s desk and for fifteen years had written for the same paper, with the pseudonym Gog and with sustained passion, a column that answered questions from readers. To my good fortune Zalamea did not search me out, and I did not search him out. I saw him once at the table of the poet De Greiff and recognized his voice and the harsh cough of an irredeemable smoker, and I was close to him at various cultural events, but no one introduced us. Some because they did not know us and others because they did not think it possible we did not know each other.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 28
