Zabala’s motives weighed on me much more than the government’s, because I had written not a press commentary but a subjective recounting of a personal incident with no pretensions to editorial journalism. Further, I had treated the curfew not as a legitimate instrument of the state but as the pretext for ignorant police officers to obtain cigarettes for a centavo each. It was my good fortune that before condemning me to death, Maestro Zabala returned the article, which I had to rewrite from top to bottom, not for him but for the censor, and he had the charity to pronounce a two-edged verdict.
“It has literary merit, there’s no question,” he said. “But we’ll talk about that later.”
That is how he was. From my first day at the paper, when Zabala conversed with me and with Zapata Olivella, I was struck by his unusual habit of talking to one while looking in the face of the other as his nails were singed by the burning end of his cigarette. At first this caused an uncomfortable insecurity in me. The least foolish thing that occurred to me, out of sheer timidity, was to listen to him with real attention and enormous interest, and not look at him but at Manuel in order to draw my own conclusions from both of them. Afterward, when we spoke with Rojas Herazo, and then with the publisher López Escauriaza, and with so many others, I realized it was Zabala’s own method for conversing in a group. I understood it in this way, and in this way he and I could exchange ideas and feelings through unwary accomplices and innocent intermediaries. With the confidence of many years I dared to tell him about this impression of mine, and he explained with no surprise that he looked at the other person almost in profile so as not to blow cigarette smoke in his face. That is how he was: I never met anyone with so peaceable and reserved a nature, with a temperament as civil as his, because he always knew how to be what he wanted to be: a wise man in the shadows.
In reality, I had written speeches, premature verses at the liceo in Zipaquirá, patriotic proclamations, petitions to protest the bad food, and very little else, not counting the letters to my family that my mother would send back with the spelling corrected even when I had been recognized as a writer. The piece that at last was published on the editorial page had nothing to do with the one I had written. Between the emendations of Maestro Zabala and those of the censor, what remained of mine were some scraps of lyrical prose lacking discernment or style and finished off by the grammatical sectarianism of the proofreader. At the last minute we agreed on a daily column, perhaps to delimit responsibilities, with my complete name and a permanent title: “Period. New Paragraph.”
Zabala and Rojas Herazo, already accustomed to the daily grind, managed to console me for my disheartening first article, and so I dared to follow it with a second and a third, which were no better. I stayed in the newsroom for almost two years, publishing as many as two daily articles that I managed to get past the censorship, signed and unsigned, until I was ready to marry the censor’s niece.
I still ask myself what my life would have been without the pencil of Maestro Zabala and the tourniquet of censorship, whose mere existence was a creative challenge. But the censor was more on his guard than we were because of his delusions of persecution. Citations from great authors seemed like suspicious ambushes to him, which in fact they often were. He saw phantoms. He was a second-rate student of Cervantes who inferred imaginary meanings. One night, under his unlucky star, he had to go to the toilet every quarter of an hour until he dared to tell us he was going crazy because of the shocks we caused him.
“Damn it!” he shouted. “With these runs I won’t have an asshole left!”
The police had been militarized as another demonstration of the government’s severity in the political violence that was bleeding the country, though there was a certain degree of moderation on the Atlantic coast. But at the beginning of May, without reasons either good or bad, the police harassed a procession on the streets of Carmen de Bolívar, about twenty leagues from Cartagena. I had a sentimental weakness for the town, where my Aunt Mama had grown up and where my grandfather Nicolás had invented his celebrated little fish of gold. With unusual determination Maestro Zabala, who had been born in the neighboring town of San Jacinto, gave me editorial management of the news item without regard for censorship and with all its consequences. My first unsigned article on the editorial page demanded that the government hold a thorough investigation of the aggression and punish those responsible. And it ended with a question: “What happened in Carmen de Bolívar?” Faced with official scorn, and now in open warfare with censorship, we continued repeating the question with growing energy in a daily article on the same page, prepared to make the government much more irascible than it already was. After three days, the publisher of the paper verified with Zabala that he had consulted the entire editorial staff and agreed that we ought to continue with the subject. And so we continued asking the question. In the meantime, the only thing we heard from the government reached us through a leak: they had given orders to leave us alone with our lunatics-at-large subject until we ran out of steam. It was not easy, because the question we asked every day was already on the street as a popular greeting: “Hey, brother, what happened in Carmen de Bolívar?”
One night when we least expected it, without any announcement, an army patrol closed Calle de San Juan de Dios with a huge clamor of voices and weapons, and Colonel Jaime Polanía Puyo, commander of the militarized police, strode into the building of El Universal. He wore the meringue-white uniform used on important occasions, and patent leather gaiters, and his sword was tied with a silken cord, and his buttons and insignias were so brilliant they looked like gold. In no way was he unworthy of his reputation for elegance and charm, though we knew he was a hard man in peace and in war, as he demonstrated years later at the head of the Colombia battalion in the Korean War. No one moved in the two intense hours he spoke behind closed doors to the publisher. They drank twenty-two cups of black coffee, without cigarettes or alcohol because both men were free of vices. When he left, the colonel seemed even larger as he said goodbye to us one by one. He took a little longer with me, looked straight into my eyes with his lynx’s eyes, and said:
“You’ll go far.”
My heart skipped a beat, thinking that perhaps he already knew all about me and that for him the farthest I could go might be death. In the confidential report that the publisher made to Zabala about his conversation with the colonel, he revealed that Polanía Puyo knew the given and family names of the person who wrote each daily article. The publisher, in a gesture very typical of his nature, told him that they were written on his orders, and that on newspapers, as in barracks, orders were obeyed. In any event, the colonel advised the publisher to have us moderate the campaign in case some barbarian caveman wanted to impose justice in the name of his government. The publisher understood, and we all understood even what he left unsaid. What most surprised the publisher were the colonel’s boasts that he knew the internal life of the paper as if he lived there. No one doubted that his secret agent was the censor, who swore on his dead mother that he was not. The only thing the colonel did not try to answer on his visit was our daily question. The publisher, who had a reputation for wisdom, advised us to believe everything we had been told, because the truth might be worse.
After I became involved in the war against censorship, I had nothing to do with the university or with writing stories. It was just as well that most of the teachers did not take attendance, which encouraged missing class. Besides, the liberal teachers who knew about my evasions of censorship suffered more than I did as they looked for a way to help me on examinations. Today, trying to recount those days, I do not find them in my recollection, and I have come to believe more in forgetting than in memory.
My parents rested easy after I let them know that at the paper I earned enough to live on. It was not true. The monthly salary for an apprentice did not last a week. Before three months had passed I left the hotel with an unpayable debt that the landlady later traded for a note on the society page about her gran
ddaughter’s fifteenth birthday. But she agreed to the exchange only once.
The most crowded and coolest bedroom in the city continued to be the Paseo de los Mártires, even with the curfew. I would stay there and doze sitting up when the late-night tertulias had ended. At other times I slept in the newspaper storeroom on rolls of paper, or appeared with my circus hammock under my arm in the rooms of other judicious students and stayed for as long as they could stand my nightmares and my bad habit of talking in my sleep. In this way I survived by luck and chance, eating whatever there happened to be and sleeping wherever God willed, until the humanitarian tribe of the Franco Múnera family proposed giving me two meals a day for a compassionate price. The father of the tribe—Bolívar Franco—was a historic primary-school teacher, with a joyful, fanatical family of artists and writers who obliged me to eat more than I had paid them for so my brains would not dry up. Often I had no money, but they took consolation in recitations after the meal. I paid frequent installments in that inspiring transaction with the stanzas of variable long and short lines written by Don Jorge Manrique on the death of his father, and the Gypsy Ballads of García Lorca.
The open-air brothels on the broad beaches of Tesca, far from the disturbing silence behind the wall, were more hospitable than the tourist hotels along the shore. Half a dozen of us, students at the university, settled down at El Cisne in the early evening to prepare for final exams under the blinding lights of the courtyard for dancing. The ocean breeze and the bellow of the ships at dawn consoled us for the blare of Caribbean brass and the provocations of the girls who danced without panties in very wide skirts so that the ocean breeze would blow them up above their waists. From time to time some little bird nostalgic for her papá would invite us to sleep with the little bit of love she had left at dawn. One of them, whose name and measurements I remember very well, let herself be seduced by the fantasies I recounted while I was asleep. Thanks to her I passed Roman law without any trickery, and escaped several roundups when the police prohibited sleeping in the parks. We got along like a serviceable married couple, not only in bed but in domestic chores, which I did for her at dawn so that she could sleep a few hours longer.
By then I was beginning to adjust very well to editorial work, which I always considered more a form of literature than of journalism. Bogotá was a nightmare of the past, two hundred leagues away and more than two thousand meters above sea level, about which I remembered only the stench of the ashes on April 9. I still had the fever of arts and letters, above all in midnight tertulias, but I was beginning to lose my enthusiasm for being a writer. This was so true that I did not write another story after the three published in El Espectador until Eduardo Zalamea found me early in July and asked me, with the mediation of Maestro Zabala, to send him another one for his paper after six months of silence. Because the request came from the person it came from, I picked up in haphazard fashion ideas that had been mislaid in my rough drafts and wrote “Death’s Other Rib,” which was a little more of the same thing. I remember very well that I had no plot prepared and invented it as I was writing. It was published on July 25, 1948, in the “Fin de Semana” supplement, just as the others had been, and I wrote no more stories until the following year, when my life was no longer the same. I needed only to renounce the few law classes I still attended on occasion, but they were my last alibi for maintaining my parents’ dream.
I did not suspect at the time that I would soon be a better student than ever in the library of Gustavo Ibarra Merlano, a new friend introduced to me with great enthusiasm by Zabala and Rojas Herazo. He had just returned from Bogotá with a degree from Normal Superior, and without delay he joined the tertulias at El Universal and the discussions at dawn on the Paseo de los Mártires. Between the volcanic loquacity of Héctor and the creative skepticism of Zabala, Gustavo brought me the systematic rigor that my improvised and scattered ideas, and the frivolity of my heart, were in real need of. And all that with great tenderness and an iron character.
The next day he invited me to his parents’ house on the Marbella beach, with the immense sea as a backyard, and a new, well-ordered library along a twelve-meter wall, where only the books you had to read in order to live without regrets were kept. He had editions of the Greek, Latin, and Spanish classics in such good condition they did not seem to have been read, but scribbled in the margins were learned notes, some of them in Latin. Gustavo also said them aloud, and when he did he blushed to the roots of his hair and tried to get around them with a corrosive humor. A friend had told me before I met him: “The guy’s a priest.” I soon understood why this was easy to believe, though after I knew him well it was almost impossible to believe he was not.
That first time we talked without stopping until the small hours, and I learned that his readings were long and varied but sustained by a thorough knowledge of the Catholic intellectuals of the day, whom I had never heard of. He knew everything that one should know about poetry, in particular the Greek and Latin classics, which he read in their original versions. He had well-informed opinions of our mutual friends and gave me valuable information that made me love them even more. He also confirmed the importance of my meeting the three journalists from Barranquilla—Cepeda, Vargas, and Fuenmayor—about whom Rojas Herazo and Maestro Zabala had spoken so often. I found it remarkable that in addition to having so many intellectual and civic virtues, he swam like an Olympic champion and had a body trained to be one. What concerned him most about me was my dangerous contempt for the Greek and Latin classics, which seemed boring and useless to me, except for the Odyssey, which I had read and reread in bits and pieces several times at the liceo. And so before we said goodbye, he chose a leather-bound book from the library and handed it to me with a certain solemnity. “You may become a good writer,” he said, “but you’ll never become very good if you don’t have a good knowledge of the Greek classics.” The book was the complete works of Sophocles. From that moment on Gustavo was one of the decisive beings in my life, for Oedipus Rex revealed itself to me on first reading as the perfect work.
It was a historic night because I had discovered Gustavo Ibarra and Sophocles at the same time, and because hours later I could have died an awful death in the room of my secret girlfriend at El Cisne. I remember as if it had happened yesterday when a former lover of hers, whom she had thought dead for over a year, kicked down the door of her room, shouting a wild man’s insults. I recognized him at once as a fellow student at the primary school in Aracataca who had come back in a rage to take possession of his bed. We had not seen each other since then, and he had the good taste to pretend not to notice when he recognized me, naked and muddied with terror, in the bed.
That year I also met Ramiro and Oscar de la Espriella, endless conversationalists, above all in houses prohibited by Christian morality. They both lived with their parents in Turbaco, an hour from Cartagena, and they showed up almost every day at the tertulias of writers and artists at the Americana ice cream parlor. Ramiro, a graduate of the faculty of law in Bogotá, was very close to the group at El Universal, where he published an occasional column. His father was a formidable lawyer and a freewheeling Liberal, and his mother was charming and outspoken. They both had the admirable custom of conversing with young people. In our long talks under the leafy ash trees of Turbaco, they offered invaluable information about the War of a Thousand Days, the literary source that had been extinguished for me with the death of my grandfather. To her I owe the view that seems most reliable to me, and the one I still have, of General Rafael Uribe Uribe, from his respectable elegance to the caliber of his wrists.
The best testimony to what Ramiro and I were like in those days was created in oils on canvas by the painter Cecilia Porras, who felt right at home at men’s wild parties, in defiance of the prudery of her social milieu. It was a portrait of the two of us sitting at the table in the café where we would see her and other friends twice a day. When Ramiro and I were about to go our separate ways, we had an irreconcilable arg
ument about who owned the painting. Cecilia resolved it with the Solomonic formula of cutting the canvas in half with pruning shears and giving each of us our part. Years later mine was left rolled up in the closet of an apartment in Caracas, and I never could get it back.
In contrast to the rest of the country, official violence had not ravaged Cartagena until the beginning of that year, when our friend Carlos Alemán was elected deputy to the Departmental Assembly by the very distinguished district of Mompox. He was an attorney fresh out of the oven, and very good-natured, but the devil played a bad joke on him in the opening session when the two rival parties opened fire on each other and a stray bullet scorched his shoulder pad. Alemán must have thought, and with reason, that a legislative power as useless as ours did not deserve the sacrifice of a life, and he preferred to spend his government salary in advance in the good company of his friends.
Oscar de la Espriella, who was a sterling carouser, agreed with William Faulkner that a brothel is the best residence for a writer, because the mornings are quiet, there is a party every night, and you are on good terms with the police. Deputy Alemán took this in a literal way and made himself our full-time host. One night, however, I repented of having believed in Faulkner’s illusions when an old boyfriend of Mary Reyes, the madam of the house, knocked down the door to take away their son, a child of five, who lived with her. Her current boyfriend, who had been a police officer, came out of the bedroom in his shorts to defend the honor and goods of the house with his regulation revolver, and the other man greeted him with a burst of gunfire that resounded in the dance hall like a shot from a cannon. The frightened sergeant hid in his room. When I came out of mine, half dressed, the transient tenants were contemplating the boy from their rooms as he urinated at the end of the hallway, while his papá smoothed his hair with his left hand and held the still-smoking revolver in his right. All you could hear in the house were Mary’s insults as she reproached the sergeant for not having any balls.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 37
