“He’s there.”
It seemed an evasion, but it was the only truth: he was there. More alive than anyone else, but also with the advantage of being alive without anyone finding out too much, aware of everything, and determined to walk to his own funeral. People spoke of him as if he were a historical relic, in particular those who had not read him. In fact, since my arrival in Cartagena I had not tried to see him, out of respect for his privileges as an invisible man. At the time he was sixty-eight years old, and no one had any doubt that he was a great poet for the ages, though there were not many of us who knew who he was or why, and it was not easy to believe because of the rare quality of his work.
Zabala, Rojas Herazo, Gustavo Ibarra: we all knew poems of his by heart and always quoted them without thinking, in a spontaneous and knowledgeable way, to illuminate our conversations. He was not unsociable but shy. Even today I do not remember having seen a portrait of him, if there was one, only some quick caricatures that were published instead. I believe that because we did not see him we had forgotten he was still alive, and one night when I was finishing my piece for the day, I heard a stifled exclamation from Zabala:
“Damn, it’s El Tuerto!”
I looked up from the typewriter and saw the strangest man I would ever see. Much shorter than we had imagined, with hair so white it looked blue and so unruly it looked borrowed. His left eye was not missing, but as his nickname indicated, it was crossed.* He dressed as if he were at home, in dark drill trousers and a striped shirt, his right hand, at the height of his shoulder, holding a silver holder with a lit cigarette that he did not smoke and whose ash fell without tapping when it could no longer hold on by itself.
He walked through to his brother’s office and came out two hours later, when only Zabala and I were left in the newsroom, waiting to greet him. He died two years later, and the upheaval it caused among the faithful seemed to be not because he had died but because he had been resuscitated. On view in his coffin he did not appear as dead as when he was alive.
During the same period the Spanish writer Dámaso Alonso and his wife, the novelist Eulalia Galvarriato, gave two lectures in the main auditorium of the university. Maestro Zabala, who did not like to disturb anyone’s life, for once overcame his circumspection and requested a meeting. Gustavo Ibarra, Héctor Rojas Herazo, and I accompanied him, and there was an immediate chemistry with them. We stayed some four hours in a private meeting room in the Hotel del Caribe, exchanging impressions of their first trip to Latin America and our dreams as new writers. Héctor brought them a book of poems, and I had a photocopy of a story published in El Espectador. What interested both of us most was the frankness of their reservations, because they used them as oblique confirmations of their praise.
In October I found a message from Gonzalo Mallarino at El Universal saying that he was waiting for me, with the poet Álvaro Mutis, in Villa Tulipán, an unforgettable pensión in the beach resort of Bocagrande, a few meters from the place where Charles Lindbergh had landed some twenty years earlier. Gonzalo, my accomplice in private recitations at the university, was already a practicing attorney, and in his capacity as head of public relations for LANSA, a national airline founded by its own pilots, Mutis had invited him so to see the ocean.
Poems by Mutis and stories of mine had coincided at least once in “Fin de Semana,” and it was enough for us to see each other to begin a conversation that is still going on, in countless places in the world, after more than half a century. First our children and then our grandchildren have often asked us what we talk about with such fierce passion, and we tell them the truth: we always talk about the same thing.
My miraculous friendships with adults in arts and letters gave me the courage to survive those years, which I still remember as the most uncertain of my life. On July 10 I had published the last “Period. New Paragraph” in El Universal, after three arduous months in which I could not overcome the obstacles of being a novice, and I preferred to stop writing it, the sole merit being that I would escape in time. I took refuge in the impunity of commentaries on the editorial page, unsigned except when they needed a personal touch. I kept this up through sheer routine until September 1950, with a pompous note on Edgar Allan Poe, its sole merit being that it was the worst of them.
During all that year I had persisted in asking Maestro Zabala to teach me the secrets of writing feature articles. He never decided to, given his mysterious nature, but he left me troubled by the enigma of a twelve-year-old girl, buried in the Convent of Santa Clara, whose hair grew after her death, more than twenty meters in two centuries. I never imagined I would return to this subject forty years later and recount it in a romantic novel with sinister implications. But these were not my best days for thinking. I had fits of rage for any reason at all, and would disappear from work with no explanations until Maestro Zabala sent someone to calm me down. I passed the final exams of the second year of law by a stroke of luck, with only two subjects to make up, and I was able to matriculate for the third year, but a rumor circulated that I had achieved this through political pressure from the paper. The publisher had to intervene when I was stopped coming out of the movies carrying a false record of military service, and I was on the list to be sent on punitive missions to enforce public order.
In my political obfuscation at the time, I did not even know that martial law had been reimposed in the country because of the increase in lawlessness. Press censorship was tightened a few more turns. The atmosphere rarefied as it did in the worst times, and a political police reinforced with common criminals sowed panic in the countryside. The violence obliged Liberals to abandon lands and homes. Their possible candidate, Darío Echandía, the teacher of teachers of civil law, a born skeptic and habitual reader of Greek and Latin authors, pronounced in favor of a Liberal abstention at the polls. The way was open for the election of Laureano Gómez, who seemed to direct the government from New York with invisible strings.
I did not have a clear awareness then that these misfortunes were not only the infamies of the Goths but symptoms of evil changes in our lives, until one of many nights at La Cueva, when it occurred to me to boast about my freedom to do whatever I wished. Maestro Zabala held in midair the spoonful of soup he was about to eat, looking at me over the arch of his eyeglasses, and stopped me cold:
“Just tell me one thing, Gabriel: in the midst of all the damn fool things you do, have you been able to realize that this country is coming to an end?”
The question hit its mark. I was dead drunk when I lay down at dawn to sleep on a bench on the Paseo de los Mártires, and a biblical downpour left me soaked to the skin. I spent two weeks in the hospital with a pneumonia resistant to the first known antibiotics, which had a bad reputation for causing side effects as terrifying as premature impotence. I was more skeletal and pale than I was by nature, and my parents called me back to Sucre to help me recuperate from an excess of work—as they said in their letter. El Universal went even further, with a farewell editorial that sanctified me as a journalist and writer of masterful talents, and another that cited me as the author of a novel that never existed and with a title that was not mine: We’ve Already Cut the Hay. Even stranger at a time when I had no intention of backsliding into fiction. The truth is that this title, so alien to me, was invented by Héctor Rojas Herazo while he was typing, as one more contribution from César Guerra Valdés, an imaginary writer of the purest Latin American stock created by him to enrich our polemics. Héctor had published news of his arrival in Cartagena in El Universal, and I had written him a greeting in “Period. New Paragraph” in the hope of shaking the dust from the dormant awareness of an authentic continental narrative. In any case, the imaginary novel with the beautiful title invented by Héctor was reviewed years later in an essay on my books, I do not know where or why, as a fundamental work of the new literature.
The atmosphere I found in Sucre was very favorable to my ideas at the time. I wrote to Germán Vargas and asked him to send me books, lots of books, as ma
ny as possible so that I could drown a predicted convalescence of six months in masterpieces. The town was inundated. Papá had renounced the slavery of the pharmacy, and at the entrance to town he had built a house large enough for his children, who numbered eleven after the birth of Eligio sixteen months earlier. A large house full of light, with a terrace for visitors overlooking the river of dark water, and windows opened to the January breezes. It had six well-ventilated bedrooms with a bed for each person—not shared, as before—and hooks for hanging hammocks at different levels, even in the hallways. The courtyard had no wire fence, and it extended all the way to uncut woods with fruit trees in the public domain, and animals belonging to the family and to other people strolled through the bedrooms. My mother, who missed the courtyards of her childhood in Barrancas and Aracataca, treated the new house like a farm, with uncorralled chickens and ducks and libertine pigs who got into the kitchen to eat the food for lunch. It was still possible to take advantage of the summers and sleep with open windows, with the asthmatic sound of the chickens on their perches and the odor of ripe custard apples that fell from the trees at dawn with an instantaneous, dense thud. “They sound like children,” my mother would say. My papá reduced his consultations to the morning hours for a few believers in homeopathy, continued reading all the printed paper that came near him as he lay in a hammock that he hung between two trees, and contracted the idle fever of billiards to counter the melancholy of dusk. He had also abandoned his white linen suits with a tie, and he walked on the street as I had never seen him do before, wearing juvenile short-sleeved shirts.
My grandmother Tranquilina Iguarán had died two months earlier, blind and deranged, and in the lucidity of her death agony she continued preaching the family’s secrets in her radiant voice and perfect diction. Her constant subject until her final breath was my grandfather’s retirement. My father prepared the body with preservative aloes and covered it with lime inside the coffin for a gentle decomposition. Luisa Santiaga always marveled at her mother’s passion for red roses, and she made her a garden at the back of the courtyard so there would always be enough for her grave. They bloomed with so much splendor that there was not enough time to satisfy the strangers who came from great distances, eager to know if so many magnificent roses were the work of God or the devil.
Changes in my life and temperament corresponded to changes in my house. On each visit it seemed different to me because of my parents’ alterations and transformations on account of my brothers and sisters, who were born and grew up looking so much alike it was easier to confuse them than to recognize them. Jaime, who was already ten, took the longest to leave the maternal lap because he had been three months premature, and my mother was still nursing him when Hernando (Nanchi) was born. Three years later came Alfredo Ricardo (Cuqui), and a year and a half after that Eligio (Yiyo), the last one, who on that vacation was beginning to discover the miracle of crawling.
We also included my father’s children before and after his marriage: Carmen Rosa, in San Marcos, and Abelardo, both of whom spent periods of time in Sucre; Germaine Hanai (Emi), whom my mother had taken in as one of her own with the approval of her other children, and, last of all, Antonio María Claret (Toño), brought up by his mother in Sincé, who visited us often. A total of fifteen, and we ate like thirty when there was enough, and sat wherever there was room.
The stories that my sisters have told about those years give an exact idea of what it was like in a house where one child had not finished nursing when another was born. My mother herself was conscious of her negligence, and she begged her daughters to take charge of the younger ones. Margot would die of fright when she learned that my mother was pregnant again, because she knew she would not have the time to rear them all. And so before she left for boarding school in Montería, she pleaded with my mother in absolute seriousness to make the next child the last. My mother promised, as she always did, though it was only to please her, because she was certain that God, in His infinite wisdom, would resolve the problem in the best possible fashion.
Meals at the table were disastrous, because there was no way for everyone to eat together. My mother and the older girls would serve as the others came in, but it was not unusual for a stray to wander in late asking for his portion. In the course of the night the younger ones kept going to my parents’ bed, unable to sleep because of the cold or the heat, because they had a toothache or were afraid of the dead, because they loved their parents or were jealous of the others, and all of them woke the next morning curled up in the double bed. If others were not born after Eligio it was thanks to Margot, who imposed her authority when she returned from boarding school, and my mother kept her promise not to have another child.
Sad to say, reality had time to interpose other plans for my two oldest sisters, who never married. Aida, as happened in sentimental novels, entered a convent on a life sentence, which she renounced after twenty-two years of meeting every obligation, when she no longer found Rafael or any other man within reach. Margot, with her stern character, lost her Rafael because of an error on both their parts. To counter precedents as sad as these, Rita married the first man she liked, and was happy with five children and nine grandchildren. The other two girls—Ligia and Emi—married the men they wanted to when my parents had already grown tired of doing battle with real life.
The family’s troubles seemed to be part of the crisis the country was going through because of economic uncertainty and the bloodshed of the political violence that had reached Sucre like an ill-fated season and entered the house, on tiptoe but with a firm step. By that time we had already eaten our scant reserves and were as poor as we had been in Barranquilla before the move to Sucre. But my mother did not worry because of her already proven certainty that each child carries his own loaf of bread under his arm. This was the state of the house when I arrived from Cartagena, convalescing from pneumonia, but the family had conspired to keep me from noticing.
The favorite subject of gossip in the town was the supposed relationship between our friend Cayetano Gentile and the schoolteacher in the nearby hamlet of Chaparral, a beautiful girl whose social status was different from his but who was very serious and came from a respectable family. It was not surprising: Cayetano always chased girls, not only in Sucre but also in Cartagena, where he had completed his baccalaureate and begun his study of medicine. But no one had known of any sweetheart in Sucre or even a favorite partner at dances.
One night we saw him coming from his farm on his best horse, the schoolteacher in the saddle holding the reins, and he sitting behind, his arms around her waist. We were surprised not only by the degree of intimacy they had achieved, but by their audacity in entering along the promenade of the main square at the time it was most crowded, and in so evil-minded a town. Cayetano explained to anyone who wished to listen that he had found her at the door of her school waiting for someone kind enough to take her into town at that time of night. I warned him as a joke that he was going to wake up any day now with a pasquín on his door, and he shrugged in a typical gesture of his and cracked his favorite joke:
“They don’t dare to with the rich.”
In fact, the pasquines had gone out of fashion as fast as they had come in, and people thought that perhaps they were another symptom of the bad political mood devastating the country. Serenity returned to the sleep of those who had feared them. On the other hand, a few days after my arrival, I felt that something had changed toward me in the minds of certain of my father’s fellow party members, who pointed me out as the author of articles against the Conservative government that had been published in El Universal. It was not true. If I ever had to write political pieces, they were always unsigned and the responsibility of management after their decision to suspend the question of what had happened in Carmen de Bolívar. The ones in my signed column no doubt revealed a clear position on the sad state of the country, and the ignominy of the violence and injustice, but there were no party slogans. In fact, I was never a mem
ber of any party, not then, not ever. The accusation alarmed my parents, and my mother began to light candles to the saints, above all when I stayed out very late. For the first time I felt so oppressive an atmosphere around me that I decided to leave the house as little as possible.
It was during these ugly times that an imposing man who seemed to be the ghost of himself appeared in Papá’s office, with a skin that let the color of his bones show through and an abdomen as swollen and tense as a drum. He needed only one sentence to be remembered forever:
“Doctor, they made a monkey grow in my belly and I’ve come to have you take it out.”
After examining him, my father knew the case was beyond the reach of his science, and he sent him to a surgeon who did not find the monkey the patient thought was there but a formless monstrosity with a life of its own. What mattered to me, however, was not the beast in his abdomen but the tale the patient told about the magical world of La Sierpe, a legendary country within the town limits of Sucre that could be reached only through steaming bogs, where it was common practice to avenge an offense with a curse, like having the devil’s spawn grow inside your abdomen.
The residents of La Sierpe were devout Catholics but they lived the religion in their own way, with magic prayers for each occasion. They believed in God, in the Virgin, and in the Holy Trinity, but they worshipped them in any object that they thought revealed divine faculties. What might seem unimaginable to them was that someone who had a satanic beast growing inside his abdomen would be rational enough to have recourse to the heresy of a surgeon.
I was soon amazed to learn that everybody in Sucre knew about the existence of La Sierpe as a real fact, the only problem being getting there past all kinds of geographical and mental obstacles. I happened to discover that the expert on the subject of La Sierpe was my friend Ángel Casij, whom I had last seen when he escorted us through the pestilential rubble of April 9 so that we could communicate with our families. I found him more reasonable than he had been on that occasion, and with a dazzling account of his various trips to La Sierpe. Then I learned all that could be known about La Marquesita, lady and mistress of that vast kingdom, who knew secret prayers for doing good or evil, for raising a dying man from his bed without knowing anything more about him than his physical description and precise location, or for sending a serpent through the swamps so that in six days’ time it would kill an enemy.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 39
