It is difficult to imagine the degree to which people lived then in the shadow of poetry. It was a frenzied passion, another way of being, a fireball that went everywhere on its own. We would open the paper, even the business section or the legal page, or we would read the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup, and there was poetry waiting to take over our dreams. So that for us aborigines from every province, Bogotá was the capital of the country and the seat of government, but above all it was the city where poets lived. We not only believed in poetry, and would have died for it, but we also knew with certainty—as Luis Cardoza y Aragón wrote—that “poetry is the only concrete proof of the existence of man.”
The world belonged to the poets. Their new works were more important for my generation than the political news that was more and more depressing. Colombian poetry had emerged from the nineteenth century illuminated by the solitary star of José Asunción Silva, the sublime romantic who at the age of thirty-one shot himself with a pistol through the circle that his doctor had painted for him with a swab of iodine over his heart. I was not born in time to know Rafael Pombo or Eduardo Castillo—the great lyric poet—whose friends described him as a ghost escaped from his tomb at dusk, with his long cape, a skin turned green by morphine, and the profile of a turkey buzzard: the physical representation of the poètes maudits. One afternoon I was in a streetcar that passed a large mansion on Carrera Séptima, and in the entrance I saw the most memorable man I had ever seen in my life, wearing an impeccable suit, an English hat, dark glasses for his lightless eyes, and a cattleman’s poncho. He was the poet Alberto Ángel Montoya, a rather ostentatious romantic who published some of the good poems of his time. For my generation they were ghosts from the past, except for Maestro León de Greiff, on whom I spied for years at the Café El Molino.
None of them succeeded in even touching the glory of Guillermo Valencia, an aristocrat from Popayán who, before he was thirty, established himself as the supreme pontiff of the Generation of the Centenario, so called for having come upon the scene in 1910, the hundredth anniversary of national independence. His contemporaries Eduardo Castillo and Porfirio Barba Jacob, two great poets in the romantic tradition, did not receive the critical justice they more than deserved in a country dazzled by the marble rhetoric of Valencia, whose mythic shadow barred the way for three generations. The generation just before ours, which emerged in 1925 with the name and drive of The New Ones, had magnificent models like Rafael Maya and, once again, León de Greiff, who were not recognized in all their greatness as long as Valencia sat on his throne. Until that time he had enjoyed a peculiar glory that carried him to the very doors of the presidency of the Republic.
The only ones who dared oppose him were the poets from the group Stone and Sky with their juvenile chapbooks, who in the final analysis only had in common the virtue of not being Valencistas: Eduardo Carranza, Arturo Camacho Ramírez, Aurelio Arturo, and Jorge Rojas, who had financed the publication of their poems. They were not all the same in form or inspiration, but as a group they made the archaeological ruins of the Parnassians tremble and brought to life a new poetry of the heart, with multiple resonances of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rubén Darío, García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, or Vicente Huidobro. Public acceptance was not immediate, and they themselves did not seem aware that they were viewed as being sent by Divine Providence to clean poetry’s house. But Don Baldomero Sanín Cano, the most respected essayist and critic of those years, hastened to write a categorical essay to thwart any attempt against Valencia. His proverbial moderation went astray. Among many definitive judgments, he wrote that Valencia had “come into possession of ancient knowledge in order to know the soul of times distant in the past, and he ponders contemporary texts in order to discover, by analogy, the entire soul of man.” He consecrated Valencia once again as a timeless poet with no frontiers and placed him among those who, “like Lucretius, Dante, Goethe, preserved his body in order to save his soul.” More than one person must have thought then that with friends like this, Valencia did not need enemies.
Eduardo Carranza replied to Sanín Cano with an article that said it all, beginning with the title: “A Case of Bardolatry.” It was the first well-aimed assault to situate Valencia within his proper limits and bring his pedestal down to its correct place and size. Carranza accused Valencia of having lit not a flame of the spirit in Colombia but rather an orthopedics of words, and he defined his verses as those of an artist who was precious, frigid, accomplished, and a painstaking carver. His conclusion was a question to himself that in essence was like one of his good poems: “If poetry does not make my blood run faster, open sudden windows for me onto the mysterious, help me discover the world, accompany this desolate heart in solitude and in love, in joy and in enmity, what good is poetry to me?” And he concluded: “For me—blasphemer that I am!—Valencia is barely a good poet.”
The publication of “A Case of Bardolatry” in the “Lecturas Dominicales” section of El Tiempo, which had a wide circulation at the time, caused a social upheaval. It also had the prodigious result of producing a thorough examination of poetry in Colombia from its origins, which perhaps had not been done with any seriousness since Don Juan de Castellanos wrote the 150,000 hendecasyllables of his Elegies to Illustrious Men of the Indies.
From then on the sky was the limit for poetry. Not only for The New Ones, who became fashionable, but for others who emerged later and jostled and shoved for their place. Poetry became so popular that today it is not possible to understand to what extent you lived for each issue of “Lecturas Dominicales,” published by Carranza, or Sábado, published at the time by Carlos Martín, our former rector at the liceo. In addition to his poetry, with his glory Carranza established a way of being a poet at six in the afternoon on the Carrera Séptima in Bogotá, which was like walking in a shop window ten blocks long holding a book in the hand that rested on your heart. He was a model for his generation, which created a school in the next, each in its own way.
In the middle of the year Pablo Neruda came to Bogotá, convinced that poetry had to be a political weapon. In his Bogotán tertulias he learned what kind of reactionary Laureano Gómez was, and as a farewell he composed, almost as fast as his pen could write, three punitive sonnets in his honor, the first quatrain setting the tone for all of them:
Farewell, Laureano unwreathed in laurel,
melancholy satrap and upstart king.
Farewell, O emperor of the fourth floor,
paid in advance, without end, forever more.
In spite of his right-wing sympathies and personal friendship with Laureano Gómez, Carranza highlighted the sonnets in his literary pages, more as a journalistic scoop than a political proclamation. But the negative response was almost unanimous. Above all because of the illogicality of publishing them in the paper of a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like the former president Eduardo Santos, who was as opposed to the retrograde thought of Laureano Gómez as he was to Pablo Neruda’s revolutionary ideas. The noisiest reaction came from those who could not tolerate a foreigner permitting himself that kind of abuse. The mere fact that three casuistic sonnets, more ingenious than poetic, could set off such a storm was a heartening symptom of the power of poetry during those years. In any event, Laureano Gómez himself, who was then president of the Republic, later prohibited Neruda from entering Colombia, as did General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in his day, but he was in Cartagena and Buenaventura, ports of call for the steamships between Chile and Europe, on several occasions. For the Colombian friends to whom he announced his visit, each stopover on the round trip was a reason for stupendous celebration.
When I enrolled in the faculty of law in February 1947, my identification with the Stone and Sky group remained unshaken. Although I had met its most notable members in Carlos Martín’s house in Zipaquirá, I did not have the audacity to remind even Carranza of that, and he was the most approachable. On one occasion I happened to see him in the Librería Grancolombia, so close to me and so accessible that I gre
eted him as an admirer. His response was very cordial but he did not recognize me. On the other hand, on another occasion, Maestro León de Greiff got up from his table at El Molino and greeted me at mine when someone told him I had published stories in El Espectador, and he promised to read them. Sad to say, a few weeks later the popular uprising of April 9 took place, and I had to leave the still-smoking city. When I returned after four years, El Molino had disappeared under its ashes, and the maestro had moved with all his household goods and his court of friends to the café El Automático, where we became friends of books and aguardiente, and he taught me to move chessmen without art or good fortune.
My friends from an earlier time found it incomprehensible that I would persist in writing stories, and even I could not explain it in a country where the greatest art was poetry. I learned this when I was very young through the success of “Miseria humana,” a popular poem sold in folded sheets of coarse wrapping paper or recited for two centavos in the markets and cemeteries of Caribbean towns. The novel, on the other hand, was limited. After María, by Jorge Isaacs, many had been written with no great resonance. José María Vargas Vila had been an unusual phenomenon with his fifty-two novels aimed at the heart of the poor. A tireless traveler, his excessive baggage consisted of his own books that were displayed and bought up by passionate readers in the entrances to the hotels of Latin America and Spain. Aura, or The Violets, his stellar novel, broke more hearts than many better ones by his contemporaries.
The only novels that survived their own time were The Ram, written between 1600 and 1638 during the colonial period by the Spaniard Juan Rodríguez Freyle, a tale so unrestrained and free about the history of Nueva Granada* that it became a masterpiece of fiction; María, by Jorge Isaacs, in 1867; The Vortex, by José Eustasio Rivera, in 1924, The Marquise of Yolombó, by Tomás Carrasquilla, in 1926, and Four Years Aboard Myself, by Eduardo Zalamea, in 1934. None of them had even glimpsed the glory possessed, deservedly or not, by so many poets. On the other hand, the short story—with an antecedent as distinguished as Carrasquilla himself, the great writer of Antioquia—had come to grief on a craggy and soulless rhetoric.
The proof that my vocation was to be only a narrator was the stream of verses I left behind at the liceo, unsigned or signed with pseudonyms, because I never had the intention of dying on their account. Even more: when I published my first stories in El Espectador, many people who had no right to were challenging the genre. Today I think this is understandable because from many points of view, life in Colombia was still in the nineteenth century. Above all in the lugubrious Bogotá of the 1940s, still nostalgic for the colonial period, when I matriculated without vocation or desire in the faculty of law at the Universidad Nacional.
To confirm this it was enough to sink into the nerve center of Carrera Séptima and Avenida Jiménez de Quesada, baptized by Bogotán excess as the best corner in the world. When the public clock in the tower of the Church of San Francisco struck twelve noon, men stopped on the street or interrupted their conversation in the café to set their watches by the official hour of the church. Around that intersection, and on the adjacent streets, were the crowded places where businessmen, politicians, journalists—and poets, of course—met twice a day, all of them dressed in black down to the soles of their feet, like our lord King Don Felipe IV.
In my time as a student, you could still read a newspaper in that spot that perhaps had few predecessors in the world. It was a blackboard, like the ones used in schools, displayed on the balcony of El Espectador at twelve and at five in the afternoon, with the latest news written in chalk. At those hours the passage of streetcars became difficult, if not impossible, for they were obstructed by the waiting, impatient crowds. Those street readers also had the opportunity to deliver a unanimous ovation when they thought the news was good and jeer or throw stones at the blackboard when they did not. It was a form of instantaneous democratic participation that gave El Espectador a thermometer more efficient than any other for taking the temperature of public opinion.
Television did not yet exist, and there were radio newscasts that were very complete but aired at fixed times, and so before you went to have lunch or dinner, you stood and waited for the blackboard to appear so you could go home with a more complete version of the world. That was where the solo flight of Captain Concha Venegas between Lima and Bogotá was announced and followed with exemplary and unforgettable rigor. When the news was like that, the blackboard was changed several times outside its scheduled hours in order to feed special bulletins to a voracious public. None of the street readers of that unique newspaper knew that the inventor and faithful follower of the idea was named José Salgar, a twenty-year-old novice reporter at El Espectador who became one of the great journalists without having gone beyond primary school.
Bogotá’s distinctive institution were the cafés in the center of the city, where sooner or later the life of the entire country would converge. In its time, each one enjoyed a specialty—political, literary, financial—so that a large part of Colombia’s history during those years had some connection to the cafés. Each person had his favorite as an infallible sign of his identity.
Writers and politicians in the first half of the century—including an occasional president of the Republic—had studied in the cafés along Calle Catorce, across from the Colegio del Rosario. The Windsor, which made history with its famous politicians, was one of the longest lasting and a refuge for the great caricaturist Ricardo Rendón, who did his major work there, and years later used a revolver to put a bullet through his inspired head in the back room of the Gran Vía.
In contrast to my many afternoons of tedium was the accidental discovery of a music room open to the public at the Biblioteca Nacional. I made it my favorite refuge for reading in the shelter of great composers whose works we requested in writing from a charming clerk. Those of us who were habitual visitors discovered all kinds of affinities with one another according to the type of music we preferred. In this way I became acquainted with most of my favorite authors through other people’s tastes, which were abundant and varied, and I despised Chopin for many years because of an implacable melomaniac who requested him without mercy almost every day.
One afternoon I found the room deserted because the sound system was out of order, but the woman in charge of the room permitted me to sit and read in the silence. At first I felt that I was in a peaceful oasis, but after almost two hours I had not been able to concentrate because of flashes of uneasiness that interfered with my reading and made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin. It took me several days to realize that the remedy for my uneasiness was not the silence in the room but the ambience of music, which from then on became an almost secret and permanent passion for me.
On Sunday afternoons, when the music room was closed, my most fruitful diversion was riding on the streetcars with blue windows that for five centavos traveled without stopping from La Plaza de Bolívar to Avenida Chile, and where I spent those adolescent afternoons that seemed to trail behind them an endless train of many other lost Sundays. The only thing I did during that journey in vicious circles was to read books of poetry, perhaps a city block for each block of verses, until the first lights were turned on in the perpetual rain. Then I made the rounds of the taciturn cafés in the old neighborhoods in search of someone who would have the charity to talk to me about the poems I had just read. At times I found him—it was always a man—and we would stay until after midnight in some dismal hole, finishing the butts of the cigarettes that we ourselves had smoked and talking about poetry while in the rest of the world all of humanity was making love.
At that time everyone was young, but we were always meeting others who were younger than we. The generations shoved one another, above all the poets and the criminals, and no sooner had you done something than someone else appeared who threatened to do it better. At times I find among old papers a few of the photos taken of us by street photographers in the atrium of the Church of San Francisc
o, and I cannot repress a roar of compassion, because they do not seem like pictures of us but of our children, in a city of closed doors where nothing was easy, least of all surviving Sunday afternoons without love. That was where I happened to make the acquaintance of my uncle, José María Valdeblánquez, when I thought I saw my grandfather making his way with his umbrella through the Sunday crowd coming out of Mass. His attire could not in any way disguise his identity: a three-piece suit of black wool, a white shirt with a celluloid collar, a tie with diagonal stripes, a vest with a watch chain, a bowler hat, gold-rimmed glasses. The impression was so strong that I blocked his way without realizing it. He raised his menacing umbrella and held it a hand span away from my eyes:
“Can I pass?”
“Pardon me,” I said in embarrassment. “I mistook you for my grandfather.”
He continued scrutinizing me with his astronomer’s gaze and asked with a roguish irony:
“And can one know who this famous grandfather is?”
Confused by my own insolence, I said his complete name. Then he lowered the umbrella and smiled with very good humor.
“Well, there’s a reason we look alike,” he said. “I’m his oldest son.”
Daily life was more bearable at the Universidad Nacional. But I cannot find the reality of that time in my memory because I do not think I was a law student even for a single day, though my grades for the first year—the only one I completed in Bogotá—might lead one to believe the opposite. There was no time or opportunity to establish the kind of personal relationships we had at the liceo, and my fellow students scattered throughout the city when classes were over. My most pleasant surprise was finding that the general secretary of the faculty of law was the writer Pedro Gómez Valderrama, whom I knew about because of his early contributions to literary pages, and who was one of my great friends until his premature death.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 29
