Living to Tell the Tale

by Gabriel García Márquez

  My most assiduous fellow student beginning with the first year was Gonzalo Mallarino Botero, the only one accustomed to believing in certain wonders in life that were true even though they were not factual. It was he who showed me that the faculty of law was not as sterile as I thought, because after the first day he took me out of the class on statistics and demography, at seven in the morning, and challenged me to a personal poetic duel in the café on the university campus. In the wasted hours of the morning he would recite from memory the poems of the Spanish classics, and I responded with poems by the young Colombians who had opened fire on the rhetorical remnants of the previous century.

  One Sunday he invited me to his house, where he lived with his mother and sisters and brothers in an atmosphere of fraternal tensions like those in my father’s household. Víctor, the oldest, was already dedicated to the theater and recognized in the Spanish-speaking world for his recitations. I had escaped the tutelage of my parents but had not felt at home again until I met Pepa Botero, the mother of the Mallarinos, an untamed Antioquian woman in the hermetic heart of the Bogotán aristocracy. With her natural intelligence and prodigious talk she had a peerless faculty for knowing the precise spot where curse words recover their Cervantine ancestry. They were unforgettable afternoons, watching dusk fall on the boundless emerald of the savanna, in the hospitable warmth of perfumed chocolate and warm crullers. What I learned from Pepa Botero, with her untrammeled slang and the manner in which she said the things of ordinary life, was invaluable to me for a new rhetoric of real life.

  Other kindred fellow students were Guillermo López Guerra and Álvaro Vidales Barón, who had been my accomplices at the liceo in Zipaquirá. But at the university I was closer to Luis Villar Borda and Camilo Torres Restrepo, who struggled, with bare hands and for love of the art, to put out the literary supplement of La Razón, an almost secret paper published by the poet and journalist Juan Lozano y Lozano. On the days the paper went to press I would go with them to the newsroom and give them a hand in last-minute emergencies. Sometimes I was there at the same time as the publisher, whose sonnets I admired, and even more so his biographical sketches of national figures, which he published in the magazine Sábado. He recalled with a certain vagueness Ulises’s note about me but had not read any of my stories, and I evaded the subject because I was sure he would not like them. Beginning on the first day, he would say as he left that the pages of his newspaper were open to me, but I took this only as Bogotán correctness.

  In the Café Asturias, Torres Restrepo and Villar Borda, my fellow students, introduced me to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who at the age of sixteen had published a series of lyrical prose pieces, the fashionable genre imposed on the country by Eduardo Carranza from the literary pages of El Tiempo. He had tanned skin and straight, deep-black hair, which accentuated his Indian appearance. In spite of his age he had succeeded in acquiring a reputation for his articles in the weekly magazine Sábado, founded by his father, Plinio Mendoza Neira, a former minister of war and a great born journalist who may not have written a complete line in his whole life. But he taught many others to write their own at newspapers that he established with great fanfare and then abandoned for high political posts or in order to found other enormous and catastrophic enterprises. I did not see his son more than two or three times during that period, and always with fellow students of mine. I was surprised that at his age he talked like an old man, but it never would have occurred to me to think that years later we would share so many days of reckless journalism, for the lure of journalism as an occupation had not yet occurred to me, and as a science it interested me even less than the law.

  In reality I never had thought it would ever interest me until one day when Elvira Mendoza, Plinio’s sister, held an emergency interview with the Argentine dramatic performer Berta Singerman, which altogether transformed my prejudices against the profession and revealed a vocation I did not know I had. More than a traditional interview of questions and answers—about which I had so many misgivings, and still do—it was one of the most original ever published in Colombia. Years later, when Elvira Mendoza was a renowned international journalist and one of my good friends, she told me it had been a desperate measure to salvage a disaster.

  The arrival of Berta Singerman had been the news event of the day. Elvira—who edited the women’s section in Sábado—asked for authorization to interview her, which she received with some hesitation on her father’s part because of her lack of experience in the genre. The editorial offices at Sábado were a meeting place for the best-known intellectuals in those years, and Elvira asked them for some questions to use in the interview, but she was on the verge of panic when she had to face the scorn with which Singerman received her in the presidential suite of the Hotel Granada.

  From the beginning, Singerman took pleasure in rejecting the questions as foolish or imbecilic, not suspecting that behind each one was a good writer, one of the many she knew and admired from her various visits to Colombia. Elvira, who always had a lively temperament, was obliged to swallow her tears and endure the rebuff. The unexpected entrance of Berta Singerman’s husband saved the interview, for he managed the situation with exquisite tact and a good sense of humor just when it was about to turn into a serious incident.

  Elvira did not write the dialogue she had foreseen, based on the diva’s responses, but instead wrote an article about her difficulties with Berta Singerman. She took advantage of the providential intervention of the husband and turned him into the real protagonist of the meeting. Singerman went into one of her historic rages when she read the interview. But Sábado was already the most popular weekly magazine, and its circulation sped upward to a hundred thousand copies in a city of six hundred thousand inhabitants.

  The sangfroid and ingenuity with which Elvira Mendoza used Berta Singerman’s foolishness to reveal her true personality set me to thinking for the first time about the possibilities of journalism, not as a primary source of information but as much more: a literary genre. Before many years passed I would prove this in my own flesh, until I came to believe, as I believe today more than ever, that the novel and journalism are children of the same mother.

  Until then I had risked only poetry: satiric verses in the magazine of the Colegio San José and lyrical prose or sonnets of imaginary love in the manner of Stone and Sky in the single issue of the paper at the Liceo Nacional. A short while before, Cecilia González, my accomplice from Zipaquirá, had persuaded the poet and essayist Daniel Arango to publish a little ballad I had written, using a pseudonym and seven-point type, in the most obscure corner of El Tiempo’s Sunday supplement. Its publication did not move me or make me feel like more of a poet than I already was. On the other hand, Elvira’s article made me aware of the reporter I carried sleeping in my heart, and I resolved to wake him. I began to read newspapers in a different way. Camilo Torres and Luis Villar Borda, who agreed with me, repeated Don Juan Lozano’s offer of his pages in La Razón, but I dared submit only a couple of technical poems that I never considered mine. They suggested I speak to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza about Sábado, but my tutelary shyness warned me that I still had far to go before I could risk a new occupation about which I had no more than a dim understanding. Yet my discovery had an immediate usefulness, because at the time I was entangled in the unhappy awareness that everything I wrote in prose or in verse, and even my assignments at the liceo, were shameless imitations of Stone and Sky, and I proposed a thorough change beginning with my next story. In the end experience convinced me that adverbs of means that end in -mente* are a bankrupt habit. I began to correct them whenever I ran across them, and each time I became more convinced that this obsession was obliging me to find richer and more expressive forms. For a long time there have not been any in my books except for an occasional quotation. I do not know, of course, if my translators have detected and also acquired, for occupational reasons, this stylistic paranoia.

  My friendship with Torres Restrepo and Villar Borda soon ov
erflowed the limits of classrooms and newsrooms, and we spent more time together on the street than at the university. Both of them were simmering over a slow fire in a stubborn lack of conformity with the political and social situation of the country. Enthralled by the mysteries of literature, I did not even try to understand their circular analyses and gloomy premonitions, but the memory of their friendship is among the most gratifying and useful of those years.

  In the classes at the university, on the other hand, I foundered. I always regretted my lack of devotion to the merits of the teachers with great names who endured our boredom. Among them was Alfonso López Michelsen, the son of the only Colombian president in the twentieth century to be reelected, and I believe this gave rise to the general impression that he too was predestined by birth to be president, as in fact he was. He came to his introductory class on the law with an irritating punctuality and some splendid cashmere jackets made in London. He lectured without looking at anyone, with that celestial air of intelligent myopics who always seem to be walking through someone else’s dreams. His classes seemed like monologues on a single note, which is what any class not about poetry was for me, but the tedium of his voice had the hypnotic power of a snake charmer. His vast literary knowledge had a reliable foundation, and he knew how to use it in his writing and speaking, but I began to appreciate it only when we met again years later and became friends far from the lethargy of the classroom. His prestige as an inveterate politician was nourished by his almost magical personal charm and a dangerous lucidity in discovering the hidden intentions of people. Above all those he liked least. But his most outstanding virtue as a public man was his astonishing ability to create historic situations with a single phrase.

  In time we achieved a close friendship, but at the university I was not the most assiduous and diligent student, and my irremediable shyness kept me at a hopeless distance, in particular with people I admired. For all these reasons I was surprised to be called to the first-year final examination despite the absences that had earned me a reputation as an invisible student. I turned to my old stratagem of deviating from the subject with rhetorical devices. I realized that the teacher was aware of my trick, but perhaps he appreciated it as a literary diversion. The only stumbling block was that in the agony of the exam I used the word prescription and he hastened to ask that I define it to be sure I knew what I was talking about.

  “To prescribe is to acquire a property over the course of time,” I said.

  He asked without hesitation:

  “To acquire it or to lose it?”

  It was the same thing, but I did not argue with him because of my congenital insecurity, and I believe it was one of his celebrated after-dinner jokes, because in the grading he did not penalize me for my indecision. Years later I mentioned the incident to him and he did not remember it, of course, but by then neither he nor I was even sure the episode was true.

  We both found in literature a retreat where we could forget about politics and the mysteries of prescription, and we would discover surprising books and forgotten writers in infinite conversations that would sometimes ruin visits and exasperate our wives. My mother had convinced me that we were related, and it was true. But more than any kind of lost relationship, our shared passion for vallenatos connected us.

  Another fortuitous relative, on my father’s side, was Carlos H. Pareja, a professor of political economy and the owner of the Librería Grancolombia, a favorite of students because of its admirable custom of displaying new books by great authors on open, unguarded tables. Even his own students would invade the shop during the negligent moments at twilight, and we would make the books disappear by sleight of hand, following the students’ code that says that stealing books is a crime but not a sin. Not because of virtue but physical fear, my role in these raids was limited to watching the backs of the more dexterous, on the condition that in addition to books for themselves, they would take a few that I had indicated. One afternoon, one of my accomplices had just stolen The City Without Laura, by Francisco Luis Bernárdez, when I felt a fierce claw on my shoulder and heard a sergeant’s voice:

  “At last, damn it!”

  I turned around in terror and confronted Maestro Carlos H. Pareja while three of my accomplices escaped in a stampede. It was my good luck that before I could beg his pardon, I realized that he had not caught me for a thief but because he had not seen me in his class for more than a month. After a more or less conventional reprimand, he asked:

  “Is it true that you’re Gabriel Eligio’s son?”

  It was true, but I told him it was not, because I knew that his father and mine were in fact estranged because of a personal incident I never understood. But later he learned the truth, and from that day on he pointed me out in the bookstore and in classes as his nephew, and we maintained a relationship more civil than literary in spite of the fact that he had written and published several books of uneven verse under the pseudonym Simón Latino. The awareness of our relationship, however, was helpful to him only because I no longer offered my services as a screen for stealing his books.

  Another excellent teacher, Diego Montaña Cuéllar, was the opposite of López Michelsen, with whom he seemed to have a secret rivalry, López as a straying Liberal and Montaña Cuéllar as a left-wing radical. I maintained good relations with him outside the classroom, and it always seemed to me that López Michelsen viewed me as a poetic dove, while Montaña Cuéllar saw me as a good prospect for his revolutionary proselytizing.

  My fondness for Montaña Cuéllar began because of a difficulty he encountered with three young officers from the military school who attended his classes in parade uniform. They had the punctuality of the barracks, sat together on the same seats apart from the rest, took implacable notes, and obtained well-deserved grades on rigorous examinations. After the first few days Diego Montaña Cuéllar advised them in private not to come to class in battle uniforms. They replied with their best manners that they were obeying the orders of their superiors, and they lost no opportunity to let him feel the weight of that. In any case, aside from their peculiarities, it was always clear to students and teachers that the three officers were outstanding students.

  They arrived in their identical uniforms, impeccable, always together, and punctual. They sat to one side and were the most serious and methodical students, but it always seemed to me that they were in a world different from ours. If you spoke to them, they were attentive and polite, but their formality was invincible: they said no more than answers to what they had been asked. When we had exams, we civilians would divide into groups of four to study in cafés, we would meet at the Saturday dances, at the student stone-throwing fights, in the tame taverns and dreary brothels of the period, but we never ran into our military fellow students.

  I almost never exchanged greetings with them during the long year when we were all at the university. Besides, there was no opportunity, because they came to classes right on time and left at the teacher’s last word, not mixing with anyone except other young soldiers in the second year, whom they would join during rest periods. I never learned their names or heard anything else about them. Today I realize that the reticence was not so much theirs as mine, for I never could overcome the bitterness with which my grandparents had evoked their frustrated wars and the atrocious slaughters of the banana companies.

  Jorge Soto del Corral, the teacher of constitutional law, was famous for knowing by heart all the constitutions of the world, and in class he kept us dazzled by the brilliance of his intelligence and legal erudition, marred only by a limited sense of humor. I believe he was one of the teachers who did everything possible to keep their political opinions from cropping up in class, but they were more evident than they themselves believed, even in the gestures of their hands and the emphasis placed on their ideas, for it was in the university where one felt with greatest clarity the profound pulse of a country that was on the verge of a new civil war after some forty years of armed peace.

  In s
pite of my chronic absenteeism and judicial negligence, I passed the easy first-year law courses with overheated last-minute cramming, and the more difficult ones by using my old trick of eluding the subject with clever devices. The truth is I was not comfortable in my own skin and did not know how to continue groping my way along that dead-end street. I understood the law less and had much less interest in it than any of the subjects at the liceo, and I felt I was enough of an adult to make my own decisions. In short, after sixteen months of miraculous survival, all I had was a group of good friends for the rest of my life.

  My scant interest in my studies was even scantier after the note by Ulises, above all at the university, where some of the other students began to call me Maestro and introduced me as a writer. This coincided with my resolve to learn how to build a structure that was credible and fantastic at the same time but had no cracks. With perfect distant models, like Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, whose protagonist investigates the murder of his father and ends up discovering that he himself is the murderer; like “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W. W. Jacob, the perfect story in which everything that happens is accidental; like Maupassant’s Boule de suif and so many other great sinners, may God keep them in His holy kingdom. I was involved in this one Sunday night when at last something happened to me that deserved to be recounted. I had spent almost the entire day venting my frustrations as a writer with Gonzalo Mallarino in his house on the Avenida Chile, and when I was returning to the pensión on the last streetcar a flesh-and-blood faun got on at the Chapinero station. No mistake: I said a faun. I noticed that none of the few passengers at midnight seemed surprised to see him, and this made me think he was just another of the men in costume who sold a variety of things on Sundays in the children’s parks. But reality convinced me I could have no doubts, because his horns and beard were as wild as those of a goat, and when he passed I could smell the stink of his pelt. Before Calle 26, the street where the cemetery was located, he got off with the manners of a good paterfamilias and disappeared among the trees in the park.