We had just begun to glimpse the outline of the domes of some churches and convents in the late-afternoon mists when a windstorm of bats came out to meet us, flying at the level of our heads, and it was only because of their knowledge that they did not knock us to the ground. Their wings whirred like a rush of thunderclaps and left in their wake a stench of death. Overwhelmed by panic, I dropped the suitcase and crouched on the ground with my arms over my head, until an older woman who was walking beside me shouted:
“Say La Magnífica!”
That is: the secret prayer for conjuring attacks by the devil, repudiated by the Church but sanctified by great atheists when they ran out of blasphemies. The woman realized I did not know how to pray, and she seized my suitcase by the other strap to help me carry it.
“Pray with me,” she said. “But remember: with a lot of faith.”
She recited La Magnífica for me line by line and I repeated them all with a devotion I have never felt again. The windstorm of bats, though I find it hard to believe today, disappeared from the sky before we finished praying. All that was left then was the immense crashing of the ocean against the cliffs.
We had reached the great gate of El Reloj. For a hundred years there had been a drawbridge that connected the old city to the outlying district of Getsemaní and the dense slums of the poor from the mangrove swamps, but it was raised from nine at night until dawn. The population was left isolated not only from the rest of the world but also from history. It was said that the Spanish colonists had built that bridge because of their terror that the poverty-stricken from the outskirts would sneak across at midnight and cut their throats as they slept. But something of its divine grace must have remained in the city, because it was enough for me to take a step inside the wall to see it in all its grandeur in the mauve light of six in the evening, and I could not repress the feeling of having been born again.
And with reason. At the beginning of the week I had left Bogotá, splashing through a swamp of blood and mud, with promontories of unclaimed corpses abandoned among smoking ruins. Then the world changed in Cartagena. There were no traces of the war that was laying waste to the country, and it was hard for me to believe that this solitude without sorrow, this incessant ocean, this immense sensation of having arrived was happening to me less than a week later in the same life.
Because I had heard it talked about so much from the time I was born, I identified without hesitation the little square where the horse-drawn carriages parked, and the freight carts that were pulled by donkeys, and in the background the arcaded galleries where popular commerce became denser and noisier. Although it was not recognized as such in official consciousness, that was the last active heart of the city since its origins. During the colonial period it was called the Portal de los Mercaderes. From there the invisible threads of the slave trade were controlled and spirits heated up against Spanish domination. Close by was the Portal de los Escribanos, its name derived from the taciturn calligraphers in woolen vests and false half sleeves who wrote love letters and all kinds of documents there for the illiterate poor. Many sold inexpensive books under the table, in particular works condemned by the Holy Office, and it is believed they were oracles of the American-born conspiracy against the Spaniards. At the beginning of the twentieth century, my father would relieve his poet’s impulses with the art of writing love letters in the Portal. The truth is he did not prosper as either poet or scribe because some clients who were shrewd, or in reality destitute, asked not only that he write their letters out of charity but give them the five reales for postage.
For several years it had been called the Portal de los Dulces, with rotted canvas awnings and beggars who came to eat the leavings of the market, and the oracular shouts of Indians who charged a good deal of money not to sing out to the client the day and hour of his death. The schooners of the Caribbean would stop at the port to buy sweets with names invented by the same comadres who made them, and versified in their vendors’ cries: “Sugar cream for my dream, chocolate drops for pops, coconut candies for dandies, brown sugar cakes, no mistakes.”* For in good times and bad the Portal continued to be the vital center of the city where matters of state were aired behind the government’s back, the only place in the world where the women who peddled fried food knew who the next governor would be before the president of the Republic in Bogotá had even thought about him.
Fascinated on the spot by the clamor, and dragging my suitcase behind me, I made my way by fits and starts through the six o’clock crowd. From the bootblacks’ stand a ragged old man, nothing but skin and bones, watched me, not blinking, with the icy eyes of a hawk. He stopped me cold. As soon as he realized that I had seen him he offered to carry the suitcase for me. I thanked him, until he specified in his mother tongue:
“For thirty pieces.”
Impossible. Thirty centavos for carrying a suitcase was a huge bite out of the four pesos I had left until I received reinforcements from my parents the following week.
“That’s worth the suitcase and everything inside it,” I told him.
Besides, the pensión where the group from Bogotá must have already gone was not very far. The old man resigned himself to three pieces, hung the sandals he was wearing around his neck, loaded the suitcase on his shoulder with a strength that was unbelievable for his bones, and ran like an athlete barefooted along a rough terrain of colonial houses crumbling after centuries of abandonment. I was twenty-one and my heart almost burst out of my mouth as I tried not to lose sight of the Olympic old man who could not have had many hours of life left in him. After five blocks he went through the large door of the hotel and climbed the stairs two at a time. With his breath intact he placed the suitcase on the floor and held out his palm:
“Thirty pieces.”
I reminded him that I had already paid him, but he insisted that the three centavos at the Portal did not include the staircase. The landlady, who came out to greet us, said he was right: the staircase was a separate charge. And she made a prediction that was valid for the rest of my life:
“You’ll see, in Cartagena everything’s different.”
I also had to face the bad news that none of my companions from the pensión in Bogotá had arrived yet, even though they had confirmed reservations for four, including me. The plan I had made with them was to meet at the hotel before six that day. The change from the regular bus to the risky vehicle from the Postal Agency had delayed me three hours, but I was there before everyone else and unable to do anything with four pesos less thirty-three centavos. The landlady was a charming mother but a slave to her own norms, as I would confirm in the two long months I lived in her hotel. And so she refused to register me unless I paid the first month in advance: eighteen pesos for three meals and a room that slept six.
I did not expect help from my parents for another week, which meant that my suitcase would not move from the landing until the friends who could help me arrived. I sat down to wait in an archbishop’s easy chair with large flowers printed on it that was like a gift from heaven after an entire day in the full sun on the truck of my misfortune. The truth was that no one was sure of anything during that time. Our agreeing to meet there on an exact day and at an exact hour lacked a sense of reality, because we did not dare say, even to ourselves, that half the country was involved in a bloody war that had been hidden in the provinces for several years, and open and lethal in the cities for the past week.
Eight hours later, stranded in the hotel in Cartagena, I did not understand what could have happened to José Palencia and his friends. After another hour of waiting with no word from them, I went out to wander the deserted streets. In April it gets dark early. The streetlights were already on, so dim they could be confused with stars through the trees. It was enough for me to take that first fifteen-minute aimless walk along the cobbled twists and turns of the colonial district to discover, with great relief in my chest, that this strange city had nothing to do with the canned fossil they described to us in
school.
There was not a soul on the streets. The crowds who came in from the outskirts at dawn to work or sell returned in a rush to their neighborhoods at five in the afternoon, and the inhabitants of the walled enclosure shut themselves in their houses to eat supper and play dominoes until midnight. The custom of owning private cars had not yet been established, and the few for hire remained outside the wall. Even the haughtiest functionaries still arrived at the Plaza de los Coches in buses made by local artisans, and from there they made their way to their offices, jumping over the stores of trinkets displayed on the public sidewalks. One of the most affected governors during those tragic years boasted that he still traveled from his elite quarter to the Plaza de los Coches on the same buses he had taken to school.
The curbing of automobiles had been unavoidable because they were contrary to historical reality: they did not fit in the narrow, twisting streets of the city where the unshod hooves of rachitic horses resounded in the night. When it was very hot, when balconies were opened to let in the cool air from the parks, you could hear, with a spectral resonance, sudden bursts of the most intimate conversations. Dozing grandfathers heard furtive steps on the stone streets, paid attention to them without opening their eyes until they recognized them, and said in disappointment: “There goes José Antonio to see Chabela.” The only thing that in reality drove the wakeful out of their minds were the dry knocks of the pieces on the domino table that echoed all through the walled district.
It was a historic night for me. I almost did not recognize in their reality the academic fictions from books, which had already been defeated by life. It moved me to tears that the old palaces of the marquises were the ones I saw in front of me, chipped and peeling, with beggars sleeping in the entrances. I saw the cathedral without the bells that had been carried off by the pirate Francis Drake to make cannons. The few that were saved from the assault were exorcised after the archbishop’s sorcerers sentenced them to burn because of their malignant resonances meant to summon the devil. I saw the faded trees and the statues of illustrious heroes that did not seem like sculptures in perishable marble but living dead men. For in Cartagena they were not preserved from the rust of time; on the contrary, time was preserved for things that continued to be their original age while the centuries grew old. That was how, on the night of my arrival, the city revealed its own life to me with every step, not as the papier-mâché fossil of the historians but as a flesh-and-blood city, no longer sustained by its martial glories but by the dignity of its ruins.
With that new spirit I returned to the pensión as it was striking ten in the tower of El Reloj. The watchman, who was half asleep, told me that none of my friends had arrived, but that my suitcase was safe in the hotel’s storeroom. I realized only then that I had not had anything to eat or drink since my meager breakfast in Barranquilla. My legs were giving way because of hunger, but I would have been content if the landlady had taken my suitcase and allowed me to sleep in the hotel that one night, even if it was on the armchair in the sitting room. The watchman laughed at my innocence.
“Don’t be an asshole!” he said in raw Caribbean. “With the piles of money that madam has, she goes to sleep at seven and gets up the next day at eleven.”
The argument seemed so legitimate to me that I sat on a bench in the Parque de Bolívar, on the other side of the street, and waited for my friends to arrive, not bothering anyone. The faded trees were almost invisible in the light from the street, because the lamps in the park were lit only on Sundays and important holidays. The marble benches had traces of legends often erased and rewritten by brazen poets. In the Palacio de la Inquisición, behind its viceregal facade carved in virgin stone and its entrance of a sham basilica, you could hear the inconsolable lament of an ailing bird that could not be of this world. Then my longing to smoke attacked at the same time as my longing to read, two habits that I confused in my youth because of their intrusiveness and their tenacity. Point Counter Point, the novel by Aldous Huxley that physical fear had not allowed me to read on the plane, was sleeping under lock and key in my suitcase. And so I lit my last cigarette with a strange sensation of relief and terror, and I put it out half smoked to keep it on reserve for a night with no morning.
My mind was already prepared to sleep on the bench where I was sitting when it seemed to me that something was hidden in the deepest shadows of the trees. It was the equestrian statue of Simón Bolívar. No one else: General Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios, my hero since my grandfather had commanded me to idolize him, with his radiant dress uniform and his head of a Roman emperor, shat upon by pigeons.
He had continued to be my unforgettable protagonist despite his irredeemable inconsistencies, or perhaps because of them. After all, they were not comparable to those with which my grandfather won his colonel’s rank and risked his life so many times in the war the Liberals fought against the same Conservative Party that Bolívar founded and sustained. I was lost in those mists when a peremptory voice behind me brought me down to earth:
“Hands up!”
I raised them in relief, certain my friends were there at last, and I encountered two police officers, rustic and somewhat ragged, who aimed their new rifles at me. They wanted to know why I had violated the curfew that had been in effect for the past two hours. I did not even know one had been imposed the previous Sunday, as they informed me, and I had not heard a bugle call or bells ring or any other sign that would have allowed me to understand why there was no one on the streets. The officers were more lazy than understanding when they saw my identity papers as I was explaining why I was there. They returned them without looking at them. They asked how much money I had and I said less than four pesos. Then the more resolute of the two asked for a cigarette and I showed them the butt I was planning to smoke before I went to sleep. He took it and smoked it down to his nails. After a while they led me by the arm along the street, more because of their desire to smoke than any stipulation of the law, looking for a place that was open where they could buy loose cigarettes for a centavo each. The night had become clear and cool under the full moon, and the silence seemed an invisible substance that could be breathed like air. Then I understood what Papá had told us so many times without our believing him—that he had practiced his late-night violin in the silence of the cemetery in order to feel that his waltzes of love could be heard all around the Caribbean.
Tired of the useless search for loose cigarettes, we went outside the wall toward a coastal shipping dock with its own life behind the public market, where the schooners from Curaçao and Aruba and other Lesser Antilles dropped anchor. It was the all-night haunt for the most amusing and useful people in the city, who had the right to a safe-conduct pass in the curfew because of the kind of work they did. They ate until dawn at an open-air stand with good prices and better company, because not only night workers went there but also everybody who wanted to eat when there was no other place open. It did not have an official name and it was known by the one that suited it least: La Cueva—the Cave.
The police walked in as if it were their house. It was evident that the patrons already seated at the table had always known one another and were happy to be together. It was impossible to detect any last names because they all called everyone by their school nicknames and talked at the top of their voices, all at the same time, without understanding or looking at anybody. They were in work clothes, except for an Adonis-like man in his sixties with a snow-white head, wearing a tuxedo from another day, with a mature and still very beautiful woman in a worn sequinned dress and too many real jewels. Her presence might have been a vivid fact of her status in life, because there were very few women whose husbands would permit them to appear in those places with bad reputations. One might have thought they were tourists if it had not been for their ease and their local accent and their familiarity with everyone. Later I learned that they were nothing like what they seemed but an old married couple, Cartagenians gone astra
y who dressed in formal clothes on any pretext in order to eat out, and that night they had found the headwaiters asleep and the restaurants closed because of the curfew.
They were the ones who invited us to supper. The others made room for us at the long table, and the three of us sat down, somewhat crowded and intimidated. They also treated the police officers with the familiarity used with servants. One was serious and confident and showed vestiges of a good upbringing at the table. The other seemed distracted except in eating and smoking. I, more because of timidity than courtesy, ordered fewer dishes than they did, and when I realized I would be left with more than half my hunger, the others had already finished.
The proprietor and only server in La Cueva was named José Dolores, an almost adolescent black of discomfiting beauty who was wrapped in the immaculate sheets of a Muslim and always wore a live carnation behind his ear. But the most notable thing about him was his excessive intelligence, which he used without qualms to be happy and to make other people happy. It was clear that he lacked very little to be a woman, and his reputation for going to bed only with his husband was well founded. No one ever made a joke about his circumstances, because his wit and rapid responses gave thanks for every favor and retaliation for every affront. He did everything himself, from cooking with exactitude what he knew each patron liked to frying the slices of green plantain with one hand and adding up the bills with the other, his only help the little he received from a boy of about six who called him mamá. When we said goodbye I was excited by our discovery but never imagined that this spot for wayward night owls would be one of the unforgettable places in my life.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 35
