After half a night of being awakened by my tossing and turning in bed, Domingo Manuel Vega asked me what was wrong. “It’s just that a faun got on the streetcar,” I told him, half asleep. He was wide awake when he replied that if it was a nightmare, it must be due to Sunday’s poor digestion, but if it was the subject for my next story, he thought it was fantastic. The next morning I did not know if in reality I had seen a faun on the streetcar or if it had been a Sunday hallucination. I began by admitting I had fallen asleep, tired at the end of the day, and had a dream that was so clear I could not separate it from reality. But in the end, the essential thing for me was not if the faun was real but that I had lived the experience as if he were. And for the same reason—real or dreamed—it was not legitimate to consider this as a bewitchment of the imagination but as a marvelous experience in my life.
And so I wrote it the next day in one sitting, put it under my pillow, and read it and reread it for several nights before I went to sleep and in the mornings when I woke up. It was a bare, literal transcription of the episode on the streetcar, just as it occurred and in a style as innocent as the announcement of a baptism on the society page. At last, hounded by new doubts, I decided to submit it to the infallible test of print, not in El Espectador but in the literary supplement of El Tiempo. Perhaps it was a way to encounter a judgment different from that of Eduardo Zalamea, and to not involve him in an adventure he had no reason to share. I sent the story with a friend from the pensión, along with a letter for Don Jaime Posada, the new and very young editor of the “Suplemento Literario” of El Tiempo. But the story was not published and my letter was not answered.
My stories of that period, in the order in which they were written and published in Fin de Semana, disappeared from the archives of El Espectador in the assault on and burning of that newspaper by government mobs on September 6, 1952. I had no copies, nor did my most conscientious friends, so I thought with a certain sense of relief that they had been burned by oblivion. But some provincial literary supplements had reproduced them at the time without authorization, and others were published in a variety of magazines, until they were collected in a single volume by Ediciones Alfil of Montevideo in 1972, with the title of one of the stories: Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait.
One was missing that has never been included in a book, perhaps for lack of a reliable version: “Tubal Caín Forges a Star,” published by El Espectador on January 17, 1948. The name of the protagonist, as not everyone knows, is that of a biblical blacksmith who invented music. There were three stories. Read in the order in which they were written and published, they seemed to me inconsequential and abstract, some absurd, and none based on real feelings. I never could establish the judgment with which a critic as severe as Eduardo Zalamea read them. Yet for me they have an importance they do not have for anyone else, for in each one there is something that corresponds to the rapid evolution of my life during this time.
Many of the novels I was reading then, and which I admired, interested me only because of their technical lessons. That is: their secret carpentry. From the metaphysical abstractions of the first three stories to the last three of that period, I have found precise and very useful clues to the elementary formation of a writer. The idea of exploring other forms had not even passed through my mind. I thought that the story and the novel not only were different literary genres but two organisms with natures so diverse it would be fatal to confuse them. Today I still believe that, and I am convinced more than ever of the supremacy of the short story over the novel.
The publications in El Espectador, on the margins of literary success, created other more terrestrial and amusing problems for me. Misguided friends would stop me in the street to ask for the loans that would save them, since they could not believe that a writer displayed with so much prominence had not received enormous sums for his stories. Very few believed the truth when I told them I had never been paid a centavo for their publication nor had I expected it, because that was not the custom in the country’s press. Even more serious was my papá’s disappointment when he became convinced I could not take over my own expenses when three of the eleven children who had already been born were in school. The family sent me thirty pesos a month. The pensión alone cost me eighteen with no right to eggs at breakfast, and I always found myself obliged to dip into that money for unforeseen expenses. I do not know where I had acquired the habit of making unconscious sketches in the margins of newspapers, on the napkins in restaurants, on the marble tables in cafés. I dare to believe that those drawings were direct descendants of the ones I had painted as a child on the walls of my grandfather’s workshop, and that perhaps they were easy outlets for my feelings. A casual acquaintance from El Molino with enough influence at a ministry to be placed as a draftsman without having the slightest idea about drawing proposed that I do the work for him and we divide the salary. Never again in my life was I so close to being corrupted, but not so close that I repented.
My interest in music also grew at this time, when the popular songs of the Caribbean—which I had taken in with my mother’s milk—were making their way into Bogotá. The radio program with the largest audience was The Coastal Hour, animated by Don Pascual Delvecchio, a kind of musical consul of the Atlantic coast in the capital. It had become so popular on Sunday mornings that we students from the Caribbean would go to dance in the offices of the radio station until late in the afternoon. That was the origin of the immense popularity of our music in the interior of the country, and then even in its most remote corners, and of social advancement in Bogotá for students from the coast.
The only disadvantage was the phantom of obligatory marriage. I do not know what wicked precedents had advanced the coastal belief that the girls in Bogotá were loose with boys from the coast and set traps for us in bed so that we would be obliged to marry them. And not for love but because they hoped to live with a window facing the sea. I never believed it. On the contrary, the most disagreeable memories of my life are the sinister brothels on the outskirts of Bogotá where we would go to drain away our gloomy bouts of drunkenness. In the most sordid of them, I almost left behind the little life I had inside me when a woman I had just been with appeared naked in the corridor, shouting that I had stolen twelve pesos from a drawer in her dressing table. Two thugs from the house knocked me down, and not satisfied with emptying my pockets of the two pesos I had left after a ruinous lovemaking, they stripped me of everything including my shoes to search every inch for the stolen money. In any event, they had decided not to kill me but to turn me over to the police when the woman remembered that the day before she had changed the hiding place for her money, and she found it intact.
Among the friendships I still had from the university, that of Camilo Torres not only was the least forgettable but also the most dramatic of our youth. One day, for the first time, he did not attend classes. The reason spread like wildfire. He had arranged his things and decided to leave home for the seminary at Chiquinquirá, some one hundred kilometers from Bogotá. His mother overtook him at the railroad station and locked him in the library. I visited him there, and he was paler than usual and wearing a white poncho, and he had a serenity that for the first time made me think of a state of grace. He decided to enter the seminary because of a vocation he had hidden very well but was resolved to obey to the end.
“The most difficult part is over,” he said.
It was his way of telling me that he had said goodbye to his girlfriend, and that she approved of his decision. After a resplendent afternoon he gave me an indecipherable gift: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. I said goodbye to him with the strange certainty I would not see him again.
I lost touch with him while he was in the seminary. I heard vague reports that he had gone to Lovaina for three years of theological training, that his devotion had not changed his student’s spirit and lay manners, and that the girls who sighed for him treated him like a movie star who had been disarmed by a cassock.
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br /> Ten years later, when he returned to Bogotá, he had assumed in body and soul the character of his investiture but preserved the best virtues of an adolescent. By then I was a writer and a journalist without a byline, married and with a son, Rodrigo, who had been born on August 24, 1959, in the Palermo Hospital in Bogotá. At home we decided that Camilo should baptize him. His godfather would be Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, with whom my wife and I had long ago established a friendship of compadres. His godmother would be Susana Linares, the wife of Germán Vargas, who had transmitted to me his skills as a good reporter and a better friend. Camilo was closer to Plinio than we were and had been his friend for a much longer time, but he did not want to accept him as the godfather because of his kinship at the time with the Communists, and perhaps, too, because of his mocking spirit that might well destroy the solemnity of the sacrament. Susana agreed to be responsible for the spiritual formation of the child, and Camilo did not find, or did not wish to find, other arguments that would block the godfather’s way.
The baptism took place in the chapel of the Palermo Hospital, in the icy gloom of six in the evening, with no one present except the godparents and I, and a campesino in a poncho and sandals who approached as if he were levitating in order to attend the ceremony without being noticed. When Susana arrived with the newborn, his incorrigible godfather let fly as a joke his first provocation:
“We’re going to make this boy into a great guerrilla fighter.”
Camilo, preparing the articles for the sacrament, counterattacked in the same tone: “Yes, but a guerrilla fighter for God.” And he began the ceremony with the highest-caliber decisiveness, not at all usual in those years:
“I am going to baptize him in Spanish so that unbelievers can understand what this sacrament signifies.”
His voice resonated in a high-sounding Castilian that I followed through the Latin of my early years as an altar boy in Aracataca. At the moment of the ablution, without looking at anyone, Camilo invented another provocative formula:
“Those who believe that at this moment the Holy Spirit has descended on this infant, let them kneel.”
The godparents and I remained standing, perhaps somewhat discomfited by the glibness of our friend the priest, while the baby bellowed under the inflexible stream of water. The only one who kneeled was the campesino in sandals. The impact of this episode remained with me as one of the harsh reprimands in my life, because I have always believed that it was Camilo who brought in the campesino with complete premeditation in order to punish us with a lesson in humility. Or, at least, in good manners.
I saw him only a few times after that, and always for some valid and pressing reason, most of the time having to do with his charitable work to benefit those who suffered political persecution. One morning he appeared at my house soon after I had married, accompanied by a thief who had served his sentence, yet the police would not leave him in peace: they stole everything he had. Once I gave him a pair of hiking boots with a special design on the sole for greater safety. A few days later, the maid recognized the soles in the photograph of a street criminal who had been found dead in a ditch. It was our friend the thief.
I do not pretend that this episode had anything to do with Camilo’s ultimate destiny, but months later he entered the military hospital to visit a sick friend, and nothing more was known about him until the government announced that he had reappeared as an ordinary guerrilla fighter in the Army of National Liberation. He died on February 5, 1966, at the age of thirty-seven, in open combat with a military patrol.
Camilo’s entering the seminary coincided with my own decision not to go on wasting time in the faculty of law, but I did not have the courage to confront my parents once and for all. Through my brother Luis Enrique—who had come to Bogotá with a good job in February 1948—I knew they were so satisfied with the results of my baccalaureate and my first year as a law student that they sent me the most lightweight and modern typewriter on the market as a surprise gift. The first one I ever had in this life, and also the most unfortunate, because that same day we pawned it for twelve pesos in order to continue the welcoming party with my brother and my friends from the pensión. The next day, crazed with headaches, we went to the pawnshop to make certain the typewriter was still there with its seals intact, and to be sure it would remain in good condition until the money to redeem it rained down on us from heaven. We had a good opportunity with what my friend the false draftsman paid me, but at the last minute we decided to put off redeeming it. Each time my brother and I passed the pawnshop, together or alone, we would confirm from the street that the typewriter was still in its place, wrapped like a jewel in cellophane paper and an organdy bow, among rows of well-protected household appliances. After a month, the joyous calculations we had made in the euphoria of our drunkenness were still unfulfilled, but the typewriter was intact in its place and could remain there as long as we paid the quarterly interest.
I believe we were not yet aware of the terrible political tensions that were beginning to disturb the country. Despite the prestige as a moderate Conservative with which Ospina Pérez came to power, most members of his party knew his victory had been possible only because of the division among the Liberals. And they, stunned by the blow, reproached Alberto Lleras for his suicidal impartiality that had made defeat possible. Dr. Gabriel Turbay, more overwhelmed by his depressive nature than by adverse votes, left for Europe without purpose or direction on the pretext of completing an advanced specialization in cardiology, and after a year and a half he died alone, struck down by the asthma of defeat among the paper flowers and faded tapestries of the Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, on the other hand, did not interrupt for a single day his election campaign for the next term, but radicalized it in a fundamental way with a program of moral renewal of the Republic that went beyond the historic division of the country into Liberals and Conservatives, making it more profound with a horizontal and more realistic distinction between the exploiters and the exploited: the political country and the national country. With his historic slogan—“¡A la carga!”*—and his supernatural energy, he sowed the seed of resistance even in the most remote places with a gigantic campaign of agitation that continued gaining ground until, in less than a year, it was on the verge of being an authentic social revolution.
Only in this way did we become aware that the country was beginning to slide into the abyss of the same civil war we had been fighting since our independence from Spain and that now was overtaking the great-grandchildren of its original protagonists. The Conservative Party, which had recovered the presidency because of Liberal divisions after four consecutive terms, was determined to use any means not to lose it again. To achieve this, the government of Ospina Pérez pushed forward a scorched-earth policy that bloodied the country and affected even daily life in people’s homes.
Given my political unawareness and the height of my literary clouds, I had not even suspected this clear reality until one night when I was returning to the pensión and encountered the phantom of my conscience. The deserted city, whipped by the glacial wind that blew along the openings in the hills, was swept by the metallic voice and intentional rough emphasis of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in his obligatory Friday speech at the Teatro Municipal. Its capacity was no more than a thousand crowded people, but the speech was broadcast in concentric waves, first by the loudspeakers in adjacent streets and then by radios played at top volume that resounded like the lashes of a whip over the astonished city, and for three and even four hours overflowed onto a national audience.
That night I had the impression I was the only person on the streets, except at the crucial corner of the newspaper El Tiempo, protected as it was every Friday by a crowd of police armed as if for war. To me it was a revelation, for I had allowed myself the arrogance of not believing in Gaitán, and that night I understood all at once that he had gone beyond the Spanish country and was inventing a lingua franca for everyone, not so much because of what his wor
ds said as for the passion and shrewdness in his voice. In his epic speeches he himself would advise his listeners in a guileful paternal tone to return in peace to their houses, and they would translate that in the correct fashion as a coded order to express their repudiation of everything that represented social inequalities and the power of a brutal government. Even the police who had to maintain order were stirred by a warning that they interpreted in reverse.
The subject of that night’s speech was an unadorned recounting of the devastation caused by official violence in its scorched-earth policy meant to destroy the Liberal opposition, with a still-incalculable number of killings by government forces in the rural areas, and entire populations of homeless, starving refugees in the cities. After a terrifying enumeration of murders and assaults, Gaitán began to raise his voice, to take delight word by word, sentence by sentence, in a marvel of sensationalist, well-aimed rhetoric. The tension in the audience increased to the rhythm of his voice, until a final outburst exploded within the confines of the city and reverberated on the radio into the most remote corners of the country.
The inflamed crowd poured into the street in a bloodless pitched battle, faced with the secret tolerance of the police. I believe that was the night when I understood at last the frustrations of my grandfather and the lucid analyses of Camilo Torres Restrepo. It surprised me that at the Universidad Nacional the students continued to be Liberals and Goths with knots of Communists, but the breach Gaitán was excavating in the country was not felt there. I reached the pensión dazed by the turmoil of the night and found my roommate reading Ortega y Gasset in the peace of his bed.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 31
