After the meal I accompanied the policemen while they completed their delayed rounds. The moon was a gold plate in the sky. A breeze was beginning to blow, and it brought from a great distance fragments of music and the remote shouts of uninhibited carousing. But the officers knew that in the poor districts nobody went to bed on account of the curfew; they organized subscription dances instead, in a different house each night, and did not go outside until dawn.
When the clocks struck two we stopped at my hotel, not doubting for a moment that my friends had arrived, but this time the watchman told us to go straight to hell for waking him up for no reason. Then they realized I had no place to sleep, and they decided to take me to their barracks. I thought the joke so shameless that I lost my temper and said something disrespectful. One of them, surprised by my childish reaction, put me in my place, pressing the barrel of his rifle against my stomach.
“Stop being an asshole,” he said, weak with laughter. “Remember you’re still under arrest for violating curfew.”
And so I slept—in a cell for six and on a straw mat fermented by other people’s sweat—on my first joyful night in Cartagena.
Reaching the soul of the city was much easier than surviving my first day. In less than two weeks I had resolved relations with my parents, who approved without reservation my decision to live in a city where there was no war. The landlady of the hotel, repentant for having condemned me to a night in jail, found a place for me with twenty other students in a shed she had constructed not long before on the roof of her beautiful colonial house. I had no reason to complain, because it was a Caribbean copy of the dormitory in the Liceo Nacional, and with everything included it cost less than the pensión in Bogotá.
Enrolling in the faculty of law was taken care of in an hour with an admission examination held before the secretary, Ignacio Vélez Martínez, and a teacher of political economy whose name I have not managed to find in my memory. As was the custom, the ceremony was conducted in the presence of the entire second year. Beginning with the preamble, I was struck by the clear judgment and precise language of the two teachers, in a region famous in the interior of the country for its verbal disorder. The first subject, chosen by lot, was the Civil War in the United States, about which I knew a little less than nothing. It was a shame I had not yet read the new North American novelists, who had just begun to reach us, but it was my good luck that Dr. Vélez Martínez began with a casual reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I had known very well since my baccalaureate. I caught it on the wing. The two teachers must have suffered an attack of nostalgia, because the sixty minutes we had reserved for the examination were used in their entirety for an emotional analysis of the ignominy of the slaveholding regime in the southern United States. And that was as far as we got. So that what I had foreseen as a game of Russian roulette was a diverting conversation that received a good grade and some cordial applause.
I enrolled in the university to complete the second year of law, on the condition, which was never met, that I sit for makeup exams in one or two subjects still outstanding from my first year in Bogotá. Some of my fellow students became enthusiastic about my way of domesticating subjects, because there existed among them a certain militancy in favor of creative freedom in a university mired in academic rigor. This had been my solitary dream every since the liceo, not because of gratuitous nonconformity but as my only hope for passing examinations without studying. But the same students who proclaimed independent thinking in the classrooms could not help but surrender to fate as they climbed the gallows of examinations, having memorized atavistic tomes of colonial texts. To our good fortune, in real life they were masters in the art of keeping alive the Friday subscription dances despite the dangers of a repression that grew more and more blatant in the shadow of the state of siege. The dances continued to be held while the curfew was in effect with the sub-rosa permission of the police authorities, and when it was canceled they came back to life with more spirit than ever. Above all in Torices, Getsemaní, or the foot of La Popa, the most pleasure-loving districts during those gloomy years. All we had to do was look in the windows and choose the party we liked best, and for fifty centavos we danced until dawn to the hottest music in the Caribbean, amplified by clamoring loudspeakers. The girls invited as a courtesy were the same students we saw during the week as they came out of school, except that they wore their uniforms for Sunday Mass and danced like guileless women under the watchful eye of chaperoning aunts or liberated mothers. On one of those nights of big-game hunting, I was making my way through Getsemaní, which had been the slave quarter in colonial times, when I recognized a strong slap on my back and a booming voice as if they were a password:
“Bandit!”
It was Manuel Zapata Olivella, an inveterate resident of the Calle de la Mala Crianza where the family of the grandparents of his African great-great-grandparents had lived. We had seen each other in Bogotá, in the midst of the turmoil of April 9, and our first shock in Cartagena was finding the other alive. Manuel, in addition to being a charity doctor, was a novelist, a political activist, and a promoter of Caribbean music, but his principal calling was trying to resolve everyone else’s problems. As soon as we had exchanged our experiences on that fateful Friday, as well as our plans for the future, he proposed that I try my luck in journalism. One month earlier the Liberal leader Domingo López Escauriaza had founded the newspaper El Universal, whose editor-in-chief was Clemente Manuel Zabala. I had heard about him, not as a journalist but as a scholar of all kinds of music, and as a Communist at rest. Zapata Olivella insisted we go to see him, because he knew he was looking for new people in order to provoke by example a creative journalism in opposition to the routine and submissive reporting that prevailed in the country, above all in Cartagena, which at that time was one of the most backward cities.
It was very clear to me that journalism was not my profession. I wanted to be a distinctive writer, but I was trying to achieve that through the imitation of other authors who had nothing to do with me. So that those days were an interval of reflection for me, because after the publication of my first three stories in Bogotá and the high praise received from Eduardo Zalamea and other critics, and good and bad friends, I felt I had reached a dead end. Zapata Olivella insisted, despite my arguments, that journalism and literature were the same thing in the short run, and a connection with El Universal could assure me of three outcomes at the same time: it would resolve my life in a dignified and useful manner, place me in the environment of a profession that in and of itself was important, and allow me to work with Clemente Manuel Zabala, the best journalism teacher anyone could imagine. The constraints of shyness produced in me by this simple argument could have saved me from a misfortune. But Zapata Olivella did not know how to endure failure and he made an appointment with me for the following day at five in the afternoon at 381 Calle de San Juan de Dios, where the paper was located.
My sleep was restless that night. The next day at breakfast I asked the landlady of the hotel where Calle de San Juan de Dios was, and she pointed it out to me through the window.
“It’s right there,” she said, “two blocks away.”
The offices of El Universal were across from the immense wall of golden stone of the Church of San Pedro Claver, the first saint from the Americas, whose uncorrupted body has been displayed for more than a hundred years beneath the main altar. It was an old colonial building embroidered with republican patches, and two large doors, and windows through which you could see everything that the newspaper was. But my real terror sat behind an unpolished wooden railing some three meters from the window: a mature, solitary man dressed in white drill, with a jacket and tie, a swarthy complexion, and the coarse black hair of an Indian, who was writing with a pencil at an old desk that had stacks of papers needing attention. I passed by again in the opposite direction, feeling an urgent fascination, and then two more times, and the fourth time, as on the first, I did not have the slightest doubt that the m
an was Clemente Manuel Zabala, just as I had supposed him to be, but more frightening. Terrified, I made the simple decision not to keep that afternoon’s appointment with a man you only had to see through a window to discover that he knew too much about life and its professions. I returned to the hotel and presented myself with another of my typical days without regret, lying on my back on the bed with Gide’s The Counterfeiters, and smoking without letup. At five in the afternoon, the door to the dormitory was shaken by an open palm delivering a blow as dry as a rifle shot.
“Let’s go, damn it!” Zapata Olivella shouted at me from the entrance. “Zabala’s waiting for you, and nobody in this country can allow himself the luxury of standing him up.”
The beginning was more difficult than I could have imagined in a nightmare. Zabala received me not knowing what to do, smoking without pause, his uneasiness made worse by the heat. He showed us everything. On one side, the offices of the publisher and the manager, on the other the newsroom and typesetting shop with three empty desks at that early hour, and in the rear a rotary printing press that had survived a riot, and their only two linotypes.
My great surprise was that Zabala had read my three stories, and Zalamea’s note had seemed fair to him.
“Not to me,” I said. “I don’t like the stories. I wrote them on somewhat unconscious impulses, and after I read them in print I didn’t know how to continue.”
Zabala inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs and said to Zapata Olivella:
“That’s a good sign.”
Manuel seized the opportunity and said I could be useful at the paper in the time I had free from the university. Zabala said he had thought the same thing when Manuel asked him to make an appointment with me. He introduced me to Dr. López Escauriaza, the publisher, as the possible contributor about whom he had spoken the night before.
“That would be wonderful,” said the publisher with his eternal smile of an old-fashioned gentleman.
We did not arrange anything but Maestro Zabala asked me to come back the next day to meet Héctor Rojas Heraza, a fine poet and painter and his star columnist. Because of a timidity that today I find inexplicable, I did not tell him he had been my drawing teacher at the Colegio San José. When we left, Manuel gave a great leap on the Plaza de la Aduana, across from the imposing facade of San Pedro Claver, and exclaimed with premature jubilation:
“You see, tiger, the whole thing’s taken care of!”
I responded with a cordial hug so as not to disillusion him, but I had serious doubts about my future. Then Manuel asked me what I had thought of Zabala, and I told him the truth. He seemed like a fisher of souls to me. Perhaps that was a determining reason for the groups of young people who were nourished by his reason and circumspection. I concluded, no doubt with the false estimation of a premature old man, that perhaps this disposition of his had prevented him from playing a decisive role in the public life of the country.
Manuel called me that night weak with laughter because of a conversation he had with Zabala, who spoke of me with great enthusiasm, reiterated his certainty that I would be an important acquisition for the editorial page, and said the publisher was of the same opinion. But the real reason for his call was to tell me that the only thing that disturbed Maestro Zabala was that my unhealthy timidity might be a great obstacle to me in my life.
If at the last minute I decided to go back to the paper, it was because the next morning one of my roommates opened the door to the shower and held the editorial page of El Universal up to my eyes. There was a terrifying note about my arrival in the city, which committed me as a writer before I was one and as an imminent journalist less than twenty-four hours after I had seen the inside of a newspaper for the first time. I reproached Manuel, who called me without delay to congratulate me, and I did not hide my anger at his writing something so irresponsible without speaking to me first. But something changed in me, perhaps forever, when I learned that it was Maestro Zabala who had written the note in his own hand. And so I fastened my trousers and went back to the newsroom to thank him. He paid little attention. He introduced me to Héctor Rojas Herazo, with his khaki pants and shirt with Amazonian flowers and enormous words fired off in a voice of thunder, who did not yield in a conversation until he had trapped his prey. He, of course, did not recognize me as one more of his students at the Colegio San José in Barranquilla.
Maestro Zabala—as everyone called him—put us in his orbit with memories of two or three mutual friends, and some others whom I ought to know. Then he left us alone and returned to the fierce battle of his blood-red pencil and his urgent papers, as if he had never had anything to do with us. Héctor continued talking to me in the light drizzling noise of the linotypes as if he had never had anything to do with Zabala either. He was an infinite conversationalist with a dazzling verbal intelligence, an adventurer of the imagination who invented improbable realities that he himself came to believe. We talked for hours about other friends living and dead, about books that never should have been written, about women who forgot us and whom we could not forget, about the idyllic beaches in the Caribbean paradise of Tolú—where he had been born—and about the infallible wizards and biblical misfortunes of Aracataca. About everything that had been and should be, not drinking, almost not taking a breath, and smoking without pause for fear that life would not last long enough for everything we still had to talk about.
At ten o’clock that night, when the paper went to press, Maestro Zabala put on his jacket, tightened his tie, and with a ballet dancer’s step that had little youth left in it, he invited us to eat. At La Cueva, of course, where to their surprise José Dolores and several of his late-night diners recognized me as an old patron. Their surprise increased when one of the policemen from my first visit passed by, made an equivocal joke about the bad night I had spent at the barracks, and confiscated a pack of cigarettes I had just opened. Héctor, in turn, started a tourney of double entendres with José Dolores that had the other patrons bursting with laughter while Maestro Zabala maintained a contented silence. I dared interject a reply without wit that at least allowed me to be recognized as one of the few clients José Dolores favored by serving them on credit up to four times a month.
After the meal, Héctor and I continued the afternoon’s conversation on the Paseo de los Mártires, which faced the bay polluted by republican garbage from the public market. It was a splendid night at the center of the world, and the first schooners from Curaçao were dropping anchor in secret. That night Héctor gave me my first insights into the underground history of Cartagena, concealed by sympathetic friends, which perhaps resembled the truth more than the amiable fiction of the academics. He told me about the lives of the ten martyrs whose marble busts were on both sides of the promenade as a memorial to their heroism. The popular version—which seemed to be his—was that when they were set in their original places, the sculptors had not carved the names and dates on the busts but on the pedestals. When they were dismantled to be cleaned for their centenary, no one knew which busts corresponded to which names and dates, and they had to be put back on the pedestals at random because no one knew who they were. The story had circulated as a joke for many years, but I, on the contrary, thought it had been an act of historical justice to erect a monument to heroes who were nameless not so much because of the lives they had lived as because of the destiny they had shared.
Those nights without sleep were repeated almost on a daily basis during my years in Cartagena, but after the first two or three I realized that Héctor had the power of immediate seduction, with a sense of friendship so complex that only those of us who loved him a good deal could understand it without reservation. For his tenderheartedness was unqualified, but at the same time he was capable of deafening and at times catastrophic rages, which he celebrated afterward with the innocence of the Holy Infant. One understood then how he was, and why Maestro Zabala did everything possible to have us love him as much as he did. On that first night, as on so many others, we s
tayed on the Paseo de los Mártires until dawn, protected from the curfew because of our status as reporters. Héctor’s voice and memory were intact when he saw the radiance of the new day on the sea’s horizon, and he said:
“If only tonight would end like Casablanca.”
He did not say anything else, but his voice brought back to me in all its splendor the image of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walking shoulder to shoulder through the fog at dawn toward the radiant light on the horizon, and the now legendary sentence of that tragic happy ending: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Three hours later Maestro Zabala woke me by telephone with a less happy phrase:
“How’s that masterpiece coming along?”
I needed a few minutes to understand that he was referring to my piece for the next day’s paper. I do not remember our having closed any deal or my having said either yes or no when he asked me to write my first contribution, but that morning I felt capable of anything after the verbal Olympiad of the previous night. Zabala must have understood matters in this way, because he already had indicated some current topics and I proposed another that seemed more immediate: the curfew.
He gave me no orientation. My intention was to recount the adventure of my first night in Cartagena, which is what I did, in my own hand, because I could not manage the prehistoric typewriters in the newsroom. It took almost four hours to produce, and the maestro revised it in front of me without any expression that would reveal his thinking, until he found the least bitter way to tell me:
“It’s not bad, but publishing it is impossible.”
I was not surprised. On the contrary, I had foreseen it, and for a few minutes I was relieved of the unpleasant burden of being a journalist. But his real reasons, which I did not know, were conclusive: since April 9, in every newspaper in the country, beginning at six in the evening, a government censor installed himself at a desk in the newsroom as if he were in his own house, with the intention and the power not to authorize a single letter that might interfere with public order.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 36
