During this same time a gigantic man came into the offices of El Universal unannounced, removed his shirt with a great sense of theater, and walked around the newsroom to surprise us with the sight of his back and arms mottled with scars that seemed to be of cement. Moved by the astonishment he had inspired in us, he explained the devastation of his body in a thundering voice:
“Lions’ claws!”
It was Emilio Razzore, who had just arrived in Cartagena to prepare for the performance season of his famous family circus, one of the great ones in the world. It had left Havana the week before on the steamship Euskera, of Spanish registry, and it was expected the following Saturday. Razzore boasted of having been in the circus since before he was born, and you did not need to see him perform to know he was a wild-animal tamer. He called the beasts by their first names as if they were members of his family, and they responded with behavior that was affectionate and brutal at the same time. He would go unarmed into the cages of tigers and lions and feed them out of his hand. His pet bear had given him a loving hug that kept him in the hospital for one entire spring. The great attraction, however, was not Razzore or the fire-eater, but the man who screwed off his head and walked around the ring holding it under his arm. The least forgettable thing about Emilio Razzore was his indomitable nature. After listening to him, fascinated, for many long hours, I published an editorial in El Universal in which I dared to write that he was “the most tremendously human man I have ever met.” At the age of twenty-one there had not been that many, but I believe the phrase is still valid. We ate at La Cueva with the people from the paper, and he was cherished there, too, with his tales of wild animals humanized by love. On one of those nights, after thinking about it a good deal, I dared to ask him to take me into his circus, even if it was to wash out the cages when the tigers were not inside. He did not say anything but gave me his hand in silence. I understood this as a secret circus gesture, and I considered it done. The only person I told was Salvador Mesa Nicholls, a poet from Antioquia with a mad love for the circus who had just come to Cartagena as a local partner of the Razzores. He too had gone away with a circus when he was my age, and he warned me that those who see clowns cry for the first time want to go away with them but regret it the next day. Yet he not only approved of my decision but convinced the tamer, on the condition we keep it a complete secret so that it would not become news too early. Waiting for the circus, which until then had been exciting, now became irresistible.
The Euskera did not arrive on the anticipated date and it had been impossible to communicate with her. After a week we established from the newspaper offices a system of ham radio operators to track weather conditions in the Caribbean, but we could not prevent the beginning of speculation in the press and on the radio about the possibility of horrifying news. Mesa Nicholls and I spent those intense days with Emilio Razzore in his hotel room, not eating or sleeping. We saw him collapse, diminishing in volume and size during the interminable wait, until all our hearts confirmed that the Euskera would never arrive anywhere, and there would be no report on what had happened to her. The animal tamer spent another day alone in his room, and the next day he visited me at the paper to say that a hundred years of daily struggle could not disappear in a single day. And so he was going to Miami with not even a nail and without a family to rebuild piece by piece, and starting with nothing, the shipwrecked circus. I was so struck by his determination in spite of the tragedy that I accompanied him to Barranquilla to see him off on the plane to Florida. Before he boarded he thanked me for my decision to join his circus, and he promised he would send for me as soon as he had something concrete. He said goodbye with so heartbreaking an embrace that I understood with my soul the love his lions had for him. I never heard from him again.
The Miami plane took off at ten in the morning on the same day that my editorial on Razzore appeared: September 16, 1948. I was preparing to return to Cartagena that same afternoon when it occurred to me to stop by El Nacional, an evening paper where Germán Vargas and Álvaro Cepeda, the friends of my friends in Cartagena, were working. The newsroom was in a decayed building in the old city, a long, empty room divided by a wooden railing. At the back of the room a young blond man in shirtsleeves was typing on a machine whose keys exploded like bombs in the deserted room. I approached almost on tiptoe, intimidated by the mournful creaking of the floor, and I waited at the railing until he turned to look at me, and in a curt way, in the harmonious voice of a professional announcer, he said:
“What is it?”
He had short hair, strong cheekbones, and clear, intense eyes that seemed annoyed by the interruption. I answered the best I could, letter by letter:
“I’m García Márquez.”
Only when I heard my own name spoken with so much conviction did I realize that Germán Vargas might not know who I was, though in Cartagena they had said they talked about me a good deal with their friends in Barranquilla after they read my first story. El Nacional had published an enthusiastic note by Germán Vargas, who was not easy to fool when it came to new literature. But the enthusiasm with which he received me confirmed that he knew very well who I was, and his affection was more real than I had been told. A few hours later I met Alfonso Fuenmayor and Álvaro Cepeda in the Librería Mundo, and we had drinks at the Café Colombia. Don Ramón Vinyes, the learned Catalan whom I longed to meet and was terrified of meeting, had not come to the six o’clock tertulia that afternoon. When we left the Café Colombia, with five drinks under our belts, we had been friends for years.
It was a long night of innocence. Álvaro, an inspired driver who became more certain and prudent the more he drank, followed the itinerary for memorable occasions. In Los Almendros, an open-air tavern under the flowering trees where they only admitted fans of the Deportivo Junior team, several patrons were involved in an argument that was about to come to blows. I tried to calm them down until Alfonso advised me not to intervene because in that place filled with doctors of soccer, things did not go well for pacifists. And so I spent the night in a city that was not the one it had always been for me, or the one of my parents in their early years, or the one of poverty-stricken times with my mother, or the one of Colegio San José, but my first time in Barranquilla as an adult, in the paradise of its brothels.
The red-light district was four blocks of metallic music that made the earth tremble, but they also had domestic corners that came very close to charity. There were family brothels whose owners, with their wives and children, tended to their veteran clients according to the norms of Don Manuel Antonio Carreño’s Christian morality and urbanity. Some served as guarantors so that apprentices would go to bed on credit with known clients. Martina Alvarado, the oldest brothel, had a furtive door and humanitarian rates for repentant clerics. There were no hidden charges, no doctored accounts, no venereal surprises. The last French madams from the First World War, ailing and melancholy, sat in the doors of their houses under the stigma of red lightbulbs, waiting for a third generation who still believed in their aphrodisiac condoms. There were houses with cooled rooms for clandestine meetings of conspirators and sanctuaries for mayors fleeing their wives.
El Gato Negro, with a courtyard for dancing under a bower of crape myrtle, had been the paradise of the merchant fleet ever since its purchase by a bleached-blond Guajiran who sang in English and sold her hallucinogenic pomades for ladies and gentlemen under the table. On a historic night in the house’s annals, Álvaro Cepeda and Quique Scopell could not endure the racism of a dozen Norwegian sailors who stood in line outside the room of the only black girl while sixteen white girls sat snoring in the courtyard, and they challenged the sailors to a fight. By dint of their fists the two forced the twelve to flee, with the help of the white girls who were happy when they woke and finished the job by hitting the sailors with their chairs. In the end, in a lunatic act of indemnification, they crowned the naked black girl queen of Norway.
Outside the red-light district there were other houses,
legal or clandestine, and all on good terms with the police. One was a courtyard of large flowering almond trees in a poor district, with a dilapidated shop and a bedroom with two cots for rent. The merchandise consisted of two anemic girls from the neighborhood who earned a peso at a time with confirmed drunkards. Álvaro Cepeda discovered the place by accident one afternoon when he was caught in an October downpour and took refuge in the shop. The owner invited him to have a beer, and she offered him two girls instead of one with a right to repeat until the weather cleared. Álvaro continued inviting his friends to drink ice-cold beer under the almond trees, not to go to bed with the girls but to teach them to read. He obtained scholarships for the most diligent to study at state schools. One of them had been a nurse at the Hospital de Caridad for years. He made the owner a present of the house, and until its natural extinction, the ramshackle kindergarten had an enticing name: “The house with the little girls who go to bed because they’re hungry.”
For my first historic night in Barranquilla they chose the house of La Negra Eufemia that had an enormous cement courtyard for dancing surrounded by leafy tamarind trees, with cabanas for five pesos an hour and little tables and chairs painted bright colors and curlews wandering as they pleased. Eufemia in person, monumental and almost a hundred years old, greeted and selected clients at the entrance, behind an office desk whose only implement—inexplicable—was an enormous church nail. She chose the girls herself for their good manners and natural graces. Each one took whatever name she liked, and some preferred the ones that Álvaro Cepeda, with his passion for Mexican movies, gave them: Irma the Wicked, Susana the Perverse, Midnight Virgin.
It seemed impossible to have a conversation with an ecstatic Caribbean orchestra playing the new mambos of Pérez Prado at top volume, and a group that played boleros for forgetting bad memories, but we were all expert in shouting our conversations. The night’s topic, brought up by Germán and Álvaro, had to do with the ingredients common to the novel and feature articles. They were enthusiastic about the one John Hersey had published about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but I preferred the direct reportorial testimony of Journal of the Plague Year, until the others explained to me that Daniel Defoe had been no more than five or six years old during the plague in London, which served as his model.
By this path we came to the enigma of The Count of Monte Cristo, which the three of them had carried over from previous discussions as a riddle for novelists: how did Alexandre Dumas manage to have a sailor who was innocent, ignorant, poor, and imprisoned without cause, escape an impenetrable fortress transformed into the richest and most cultivated man of his time? The answer was that when Edmund Dantès entered the castle of If he already had constructed inside him the Abbot Faria, who transmitted to him in prison the essence of his knowledge and revealed what he needed to know for his new life: the place where a fantastic treasure was hidden, and the way to escape. That is: Dumas constructed two different characters and then switched their destinies. So that when Dantès escaped he was already one character inside another, and all that was left of himself was his good swimmer’s body.
It was clear to Germán that Dumas had made his character a sailor so that he could escape from the burlap sack and swim to shore when they threw him into the sea. Álvaro, erudite and no doubt more caustic, replied that this was no guarantee of anything because sixty percent of Christopher Columbus’s crews did not know how to swim. Nothing pleased him as much as sprinkling those grains of pepper to rid the stew of any aftertaste of pedantry. Carried away by the game of literary enigmas, I began to drink without moderation the cane rum with lemon that the others were drinking in slow sips. The conclusion of all three was that the talent and handling of information by Dumas in that novel, and perhaps in all his work, was more a reporter’s than a novelist’s.
In the end it was clear to me that my new friends read Quevedo and James Joyce with the same pleasure they derived from reading Arthur Conan Doyle. They had an inexhaustible sense of humor and were capable of spending whole nights singing boleros and vallenatos or reciting without hesitation the best poetry of the Golden Age. By different paths we came to agree that the summit of world poetry are the stanzas of Don Jorge Manrique on the death of his father. The night turned into a delicious entertainment that did away with any last prejudices that could have hindered my friendship with this band of learned maniacs. I felt so comfortable with them and the barbarous rum that I took off the straitjacket of my shyness. Susana the Perverse, who in March of that year had won the dance contest during Carnival, asked me to dance. They shooed the chickens and curlews away from the floor and stood in a circle around us to encourage us.
We danced the series of Dámaso Pérez Prado’s Mambo No. 5. With the breath I had left I took over the maracas on the tropical group’s platform and for more than an hour I sang without stopping boleros of Daniel Santos, Agustín Lara, and Bienvenido Granda. As I sang I felt redeemed by a wind of liberation. I never knew if the three of them were proud or ashamed of me, but when I went back to the table they greeted me as one of their own.
Álvaro had begun a topic that the others never discussed with him: the movies. For me it was a providential discovery, because I always had considered movies a subsidiary art nourished more by the theater than the novel. But Álvaro viewed film, in a sense, as I viewed music: as an art that was useful to all the others.
At dawn, when he was both sleepy and drunk, Álvaro drove the car crammed with recent books and literary supplements of the New York Times as if he were a master cab driver. We dropped Germán and Alfonso at their houses, and Álvaro insisted on taking me to his to see his library, which covered three walls, floor to ceiling, of his bedroom. He made a complete turn, pointing at them with his index finger, and said:
“These are the only writers in the world who know how to write.”
I was in a state of excitement that made me forget what yesterday had been hunger and fatigue. The alcohol was still alive inside me like a state of grace. Álvaro showed me his favorite books, in Spanish and English, and he spoke of each one with his rusty voice, his disheveled hair, his eyes more demented than ever. He spoke of Azorín and Saroyan—two weaknesses of his—and of others whose public and private lives he knew down to their underwear. It was the first time I heard the name of Virginia Woolf, whom he called Old Lady Woolf, like Old Man Faulkner. My amazement inspired him to the point of delirium. He seized the pile of books he had shown me as his favorites and placed them in my hands.
“Don’t be an asshole,” he said, “take them all, and when you finish reading them we’ll come get them no matter where you are.”
For me they were an inconceivable treasure that I did not dare put at risk when I did not have even a miserable hole where I could keep them. At last he resigned himself to giving me the Spanish version of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, with the unappealable prediction that I would learn it by heart.
Day was breaking. I wanted to go back to Cartagena on the first bus, but Álvaro insisted that I sleep in the other twin bed.
“What the hell!” he said with his last bit of strength. “Come live here and tomorrow we’ll find you a fabulous job.”
I lay down in my clothes on the bed, and only then did I feel in my body the immense weight of being alive. He did the same and we slept until eleven in the morning, when his mother, the adored and feared Sara Samudio, knocked on the door with a clenched fist, believing that the only child of her life was dead.
“Don’t pay attention to her, Maestro,” Álvaro said to me from the depths of sleep. “Every morning she says the same thing, and the serious part is that one day it’ll be true.”
I went back to Cartagena with the air of someone who had discovered the world. Then the recitations after meals in the house of the Franco Múnera family were not poems of the Golden Age and Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems, but paragraphs from Mrs. Dalloway and the ravings of its heartbreaking character, Septimus Warren Smith. I turned into a
nother person, restless and difficult, to the point where Héctor and Maestro Zabala thought I had become a conscious imitator of Álvaro Cepeda. Gustavo Ibarra, with his compassionate vision of the Caribbean heart, was amused by my tale of the night in Barranquilla, while he gave me more and more rational spoonfuls of Greek poets, with the express and never-explained exception of Euripides. He introduced me to Melville: the literary feat of Moby-Dick, the magnificent sermon about Jonah for whalers weathered on all the oceans of the world under the immense dome constructed with the ribs of whales. He lent me Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, which marked me for life. Together we attempted a theory of the fatality of nostalgia in the wanderings of Ulysses Odysseus, where we became lost and never found our way out. Half a century later I discovered it resolved in a masterful text by Milan Kundera.
During this same period I had my sole encounter with the great poet Luis Carlos López, better known as El Tuerto, or One-eye, who had invented a comfortable way of being dead without dying, and buried without a funeral, and above all without orations. He lived in the historic center in a historic house on the historic Calle del Tablón, where he was born and lived without disturbing anyone. He saw a very few old friends, while his reputation for being a great poet continued to grow in his lifetime as only posthumous glory grows.
They called him one-eyed even though he was not, because in reality he was only cross-eyed, but in an unusual way that was very difficult to characterize. His brother, Domingo López Escauriaza, the publisher of El Universal, always had the same answer for those who asked about him:
Living to Tell the Tale Page 38
