None of the witnesses recalled hearing it from his lips or from anyone else’s. Over time it was attributed to a variety of talents, and people even discussed its political merits and historical validity, but never its literary splendor. From that time on it became the motto of the government of Ospina Pérez, and one of the pillars of his glory. It has even been said that it was invented by various Conservative journalists, and with more reason by the noted writer, politician, and current minister of mines and petroleum, Joaquín Estrada Monsalve, who in fact was in the Palacio Presidencial but not inside the conference room. So the sentence remained in history as having been said by the one who should have said it, in a devastated city where the ashes were beginning to cool, and in a country that would never be the same again.
In the long run, the real merit of the president was not inventing historic sentences but putting off the Liberals with soporific candies until after midnight, when fresh troops arrived to put down the rebellion of the lower classes and impose a Conservative peace. Only then, at eight in the morning on April 10, did he wake Darío Echandía with a nightmarish eleven rings of the telephone and name him minister of the interior for a regime of consolatory bipartisanship. Laureano Gómez, displeased with the solution and uneasy about his personal safety, traveled to New York with his family while conditions were beginning to favor his eternal longing to be president.
Every dream of fundamental social change for which Gaitán had died vanished in the smoking rubble of the city. The dead in the streets of Bogotá and the deaths caused by official repression in the years that followed must have amounted to more than a million, not to mention the wretched poverty and exile of so many others. Long before the Liberal leaders placed high in the government began to realize they had assumed the risk of passing into history as accomplices.
Among the many historic witnesses to that day in Bogotá, there were two who did not know each other at the time and years later would be two of my great friends. One was Luis Cardoza y Aragón, a political and literary poet and essayist from Guatemala who was attending the Pan-American Conference as the foreign minister of his country and the head of its delegation. The other was Fidel Castro. Both were also accused at one time or another of being implicated in the disturbances.
The specific accusation against Cardoza y Aragón was that he had been one of the instigators, cloaked by his credentials as a special delegate of the progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. It must be understood that Cardoza y Aragón was the delegate of a historic government and a great poet of our language who never would have lent support to an insane adventure. The most painful evocation in his beautiful book of memoirs was the accusation by Enrique Santos Montejo (Calibán), who claimed in his popular column in El Tiempo, “The Dance of the Hours,” that his official mission was to assassinate General George Marshall. Numerous delegates to the conference took steps to have the paper rectify that lunatic rumor, but it was not possible. El Siglo, the official organ of Conservatism in power, proclaimed to the four winds that Cardoza y Aragón had instigated the riots.
I met him and his wife, Lya Kostakowsky, many years later in Mexico City at their house in Coyoacán, sanctified by memories and made even more beautiful by the original works of great painters of the time. Their friends would gather there on Sunday nights for intimate evenings of an unpretentious importance. He considered himself a survivor, first because his car was machine-gunned by snipers just hours after the crime. And days later, when the rebellion had been put down, a drunkard stopped him in the street and fired into his face with a revolver that jammed twice. April 9 was a recurrent subject of our conversations, in which rage mixed with nostalgia for the years that were gone.
Fidel Castro, in turn, was the victim of all kinds of absurd charges because of actions connected to his position as a student activist. On the black night, after an awful day among the rampaging mobs, he ended up in the Quinta División of the Policía Nacional, looking for a useful way to help end the slaughter in the streets. One would have to know him to imagine his desperation in the fortress in revolt, where it seemed impossible to reach a consensus.
He met with the leaders of the garrison and other rebelling officers and tried to convince them, without success, that any force that stays in its barracks is lost. He proposed that they take their men out to struggle in the streets for the maintenance of order and a more equitable system. He presented all kinds of historical precedents but was not heard, while official troops and tanks were riddling the fortress with bullets. In the end, he decided to throw in his lot with the others.
In the small hours Plinio Mendoza Neira arrived at the Quinta División with instructions from the Liberal leadership to obtain the peaceful surrender not only of the officers and men in revolt, but of numerous Liberals who were adrift as they waited for orders to act. In the long hours needed to negotiate an agreement, the image remained fixed in Mendoza Neira’s memory of the stocky, argumentative Cuban student who intervened several times in the controversies between the Liberal leaders and the rebellious officers with a lucidity that surpassed everyone else’s. He learned who he was only years later in Caracas, when Fidel Castro was already in the Sierra Maestra, because he happened to see him in a photograph of that terrible night.
I met him eleven years later, when I was present as a reporter for his triumphant entry into Havana, and in time we achieved a personal friendship that has endured countless difficulties over the years. In my long conversations with him about everything divine and human, April 9 has been a recurrent subject that Fidel Castro would always evoke as one of the decisive dramas in his formation. Above all the night in the Quinta División, where he realized that most of the rebels who were coming in and going out were wasting their time looting instead of persisting in the urgent effort to find a political solution.
While those two friends were witnesses to the events that divided the history of Colombia in two, my brother and I survived in the darkness with the other refugees in Uncle Juanito’s house. At no moment did I realize that I was already an apprentice writer who would try one day to reconstruct from memory the testimony of the hideous days we were living through. My only concern at the time was the most mundane of all: to inform our family that we were alive—at least so far—and find out at the same time about our parents and brothers and sisters, and above all about Margot and Aida, the two oldest girls, who were students at boarding schools in distant cities.
Uncle Juanito’s refuge had been a miracle. The first days were difficult because of the constant shooting and the lack of reliable news. But little by little we began exploring the nearby businesses and were able to buy things to eat. The streets were occupied by assault troops with absolute orders to shoot. In order to circulate with no restrictions, the incorrigible José Palencia disguised himself as a soldier with an explorer’s hat and gaiters he found in a box of trash, and by a miracle he escaped the first patrol that discovered him.
The commercial radio stations, silenced before midnight, remained under the control of the army. The telegraph and telephones, primitive and scarce, were reserved for security forces, and no other means of communication existed. The lines for sending telegrams were endless outside the packed offices, but the radio stations inaugurated a service for sending messages on the air for those lucky enough to hear them. This seemed the easiest and most reliable method, and we turned to it without much hope.
My brother and I went outside after three days of confinement. It was a horrific sight. The city was in ruins, cloudy and dark because of the constant rain that had dampened the fires but delayed recovery. Many streets in the center were closed because of nests of snipers on the roofs, and you had to make senseless detours by order of patrols armed as if for a world war. The stink of death in the streets was unbearable. The army trucks had not yet picked up the promontories of bodies on the sidewalks, and the soldiers had to confront groups of people desperate to identify their relatives.
In t
he ruins of what had been the business center, the stench was so unbreathable that many families had to give up their search. On one of the great pyramids of corpses one body stood out, barefoot and trouserless but wearing an impeccable frock coat. Three days later, the ashes still exhaled the stench of unclaimed bodies rotting in the rubble or piled up on the sidewalks.
When we least expected it, my brother and I were stopped cold by the unmistakable sound of a rifle bolt at our backs, and a categorical order:
“Hands up!”
I raised them without even thinking about it, petrified with terror, until I was brought back to life by the laugh of our friend Ángel Casij, who had responded to the Armed Forces call-up as a reservist first class. Thanks to him, the refugees in Uncle Juanito’s house were able to send a message over the air after waiting for a day in front of Radio Nacional. My father heard it in Sucre among the countless messages that were read day and night for two weeks. My brother and I, irredeemable victims of the family’s conjectural mania, were afraid our mother might interpret the news as an act of charity by friends while they prepared her for the worst. We were not far from wrong: beginning on the first night, our mother had dreamed that her two oldest children had drowned in a sea of blood during the disturbances. It must have been so convincing a nightmare that when the truth reached her by other means, she decided that neither of us would ever return to Bogotá, even if we had to stay at home and die of hunger. Her decision must have been final because the only order our parents gave us in their first telegram was that we should travel to Sucre as soon as possible to determine our futures.
In the tense period of waiting, various fellow students had painted the golden possibilities of continuing my studies in Cartagena de Indias, thinking that Bogotá would recover from its rubble but the Bogotáns would never recover from the terror and horror of the slaughter. Cartagena had a centenarian university as prestigious as its historical relics, and a faculty of law on a human scale where they would accept as valid my poor grades from the Universidad Nacional.
I did not want to reject the idea without first letting it cook over a high flame, or mention it to my parents until I had tested it myself. All I told them was that I would fly to Sucre by way of Cartagena, since the Magdalena River during that shooting war might be a suicidal route. Luis Enrique, for his part, said he would look for work in Barranquilla as soon as he could settle accounts with his employers in Bogotá.
In any case, I knew I would not be a lawyer anywhere. I just wanted to gain a little more time in order to distract my parents, and Cartagena might be a good technical stopping place to think. What never occurred to me is that this reasonable calculation would lead me to resolve, my heart in my hand, that it was the place where I wanted to continue my life.
Obtaining five seats in the same plane for any place along the coast during that time was a feat of my brother’s. After standing in interminable and dangerous lines and spending an entire day running around an emergency airport, he found the five seats in three separate planes, at improbable times and in the midst of invisible shots and explosions. Two seats were confirmed for my brother and me in the same plane to Barranquilla, but at the last minute we left on different flights. The drizzle and fog that had persisted in Bogotá since the previous Friday stank of gunpowder and rotting bodies. On the way from the house to the airport we were questioned at two successive military checkpoints where the soldiers were dazed with terror. At the second checkpoint they threw themselves to the ground and made us go down too because of an explosion followed by the firing of heavy weapons that turned out to have been caused by a leak of industrial gas. Other passengers heard him when a soldier told us that his drama was standing guard there for three days with no relief, but also with no ammunition since there was none left in the city. We almost did not dare to speak after they stopped us, and the terror of the soldiers was the finishing touch. But after the formal procedures involving identification and destination, it comforted us to know we had to remain there and do nothing else until we were taken on board. The only thing I smoked while I was waiting were two of the three cigarettes that someone had given me out of charity, and I saved one for the terror of the flight.
Since there were no telephones, the announcements of flights and other changes were learned at the different checkpoints by means of military orderlies on motorcycles. At eight in the morning they called a group of passengers to board without delay a plane for Barranquilla that was not mine. Later I learned that the other three people in our group embarked with my brother at another checkpoint. My solitary wait was an asinine cure for my congenital fear of flying, because when it was time to board the plane the sky was overcast and there was stony thunder. And since the stairs to our plane had been taken for another, two soldiers had to help me board on a bricklayer’s ladder. It was in the same airport and at the same time that Fidel Castro boarded another plane that left for Havana with a cargo of fighting bulls—as he told me years later.
To my good or bad fortune, I was on a DC-3 smelling of fresh paint and recent grease, without individual lights or ventilation regulated from the passenger cabin. It was outfitted to transport troops, and instead of separate seats in rows of three, as on tourist flights, there were two long benches made of ordinary planks well anchored to the floor. My luggage consisted of a canvas suitcase with two or three changes of dirty clothing, books of poetry, and clippings from literary supplements that my brother Luis Enrique had managed to save. The passengers sat facing one another from the cockpit to the tail. Instead of safety belts there were two hemp cables for tying up ships, which were like two long collective safety belts for each side. The hardest thing for me was that as soon as I lit the only cigarette I had saved in order to survive the flight, the pilot in overalls announced from the cockpit that smoking was prohibited because the plane’s gasoline tanks were at our feet under the wooden floor. Those were three interminable hours of flying.
When we arrived in Barranquilla it had just rained as it rains only in April, with houses torn up by the roots and carried away by the current in the streets, and solitary patients drowned in their beds. I had to wait for the weather to clear, in the airport thrown into confusion because of the flood, and I just managed to learn that the plane taken by my brother and his two companions had arrived on time, but they had rushed to leave the terminal before the initial thunderclaps of the first downpour.
I needed another three hours to reach the travel agency, and I missed the last bus that left for Cartagena on a schedule that had been moved up in anticipation of the storm. I did not worry because I believed my brother had gone there, but I was frightened for myself at the idea of spending the night in Barranquilla with no money. At last, thanks to José Palencia, I obtained emergency shelter in the house of the beautiful sisters Ilse and Lila Albarracín, and three days later I traveled to Cartagena in the broken-down vehicle of the Postal Agency. My brother Luis Enrique would stay in Barranquilla hoping for a job. I had no more than eight pesos left, but José Palencia promised to bring me a little more on the night bus. There was no room, not even standing room, but the driver agreed to carry three passengers on the roof, sitting on the freight and suitcases, for a quarter of the regular price. In so strange a situation, and in the full sunlight, I believe I had become aware that on April 9, 1948, the twentieth century began in Colombia.
6
AT THE END OF A JOURNEY of lethal jolting along the hairpin curves of the highway, the Postal Agency truck breathed its last just where it deserved to: mired in a mangrove swamp that reeked of rotting fish half a league from Cartagena de Indias. “The man who travels in a truck doesn’t know where he’s going to die,” I recalled, along with the memory of my grandfather. The passengers, stupefied by six hours of naked sun and the stink of the salt marshes, did not wait for the ladder to be lowered in order to disembark but hurried to throw over the side the crates of chickens, bundles of plantains, and all kinds of things for selling or for killing that th
ey had used as seats on the roof of the truck. The driver jumped down from the cab and announced in a caustic shout:
“La Heroica!”
It is the emblematic name by which Cartagena de Indias is known because of its past glories, and that is where it should have been. But I did not see it because I almost could not breathe inside the black wool suit I had been wearing since April 9. The other two in my wardrobe had met the same fate as the typewriter in the pawnshop, but the honorable version for my parents was that the typewriter and other personal trifles had disappeared along with my clothes in the confusion of the fire. The brash driver, who had made fun of my bandit’s appearance during the trip, was about to burst with amusement as I kept turning in circles without finding the city.
“It’s up your ass!” he shouted at me for all to hear. “And be careful, they give medals to assholes there.”
Cartagena de Indias, in fact, had been at my back for four hundred years, but it was not easy for me to imagine it half a league from the mangrove swamps, concealed by the legendary wall that had kept it safe from heathens and pirates during its great years, and disappearing in the end under a thicket of branches growing wild and long trails of yellow bellflowers. And so I joined the confusion of passengers and dragged my suitcase through brambles carpeted with live crabs whose shells popped like firecrackers under the soles of our shoes. Then it was impossible for me not to remember the petate that my companions tossed into the Magdalena River on my first trip, or the funereal trunk I dragged across half the country crying with rage during my early years at the liceo, and that I at last threw over a precipice in the Andes in honor of my bachelor’s degree. It always seemed to me there was something of another person’s destiny in those undeserved extra loads, and my years have not been long enough to disprove that.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 34
