At this time Álvaro Mutis and Gonzalo Mallarino returned, but I had the fortunate modesty not to ask them to read the unfinished rough draft that still had no title. I wanted to lock myself away and without interruption make the first copy on standard paper before the final correction. I had some forty pages more than the version I had anticipated, but I still did not know that this could be a serious obstacle. I soon learned that it was: I am slave to a perfectionist exactitude that forces me to make a preliminary calculation of the length of a book, with the exact number of pages in each chapter and in the book as a whole. A single notable mistake in these calculations would oblige me to reconsider everything, because even a typing error disturbs me as much as a creative one. I thought this absolutist method was due to a heightened sense of responsibility, but today I know it was simple terror, pure and physical.
On the other hand, once again not heeding Don Ramón Vinyes, I sent the complete first draft to Gustavo Ibarra when I considered it finished, though it still did not have a title. Two days later he invited me to his house. I found him in a reed rocking chair on the terrace facing the sea, tanned and relaxed in beach attire, and I was moved by the tenderness with which he caressed my pages as he talked to me. A true teacher, who did not deliver a lecture on the book or tell me if he thought it was good or bad, but who made me aware of his ethical values. When he finished he observed me with satisfaction and concluded with his everyday simplicity:
“This is the myth of Antigone.”
From my expression he realized that I did not understand, and he took the book by Sophocles down from his shelves and read to me what he meant. The dramatic situation in my novel was in essence the same as Antigone’s, condemned to leaving the body of her brother Polynices unburied by order of King Creon, their uncle. I had read Oedipus in Colonus in the volume that Gustavo himself had given to me in the days when we first met, but I did not recall the myth of Antigone well enough to reconstruct it from memory within the drama of the banana zone, and I had not noticed their emotional affinities until then. I felt my soul stirred by happiness and disillusionment. That night I read the work again, with a strange mixture of pride at having coincided in good faith with so great a writer, and sorrow at the public embarrassment of plagiarism. After a week of dark crisis I decided to make some fundamental changes that would rescue my good faith, still not realizing the superhuman vanity of modifying a book of mine so that it would not resemble one by Sophocles. At last—resigned—I felt I had the moral right to use a sentence of his as a reverential epigraph, which I did.
The move to Cartagena saved us in time from the serious and dangerous deterioration in Sucre, but most of our calculations were illusory, as much for the meagerness of our income as for the size of the family. My mother used to say that the children of the poor eat more and grow faster than those of the rich, and the example of her own house was sufficient proof of this. All of our salaries would not have been enough for us to live without sudden alarms.
Time took care of the rest. Jaime, by means of another family scheme, became a civil engineer, the only one in a family that valued a degree as if it were an aristocratic title. Luis Enrique was a teacher of accounting, and Gustavo graduated as a topographer, and both continued to be the same guitarists and singers of other people’s serenades. Yiyo surprised us from a very early age with a well-defined literary vocation and a strong character, of which he had given us an early demonstration at the age of five when he was caught trying to set fire to a closet full of clothes in the hope of seeing firefighters putting out the blaze inside the house. Later, when he and his brother Cuqui were invited by older fellow students to smoke marijuana, Yiyo was frightened and refused. Cuqui, on the other hand, who was always curious and reckless, inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. Years later, shipwrecked in the quicksand of drugs, he told me that after that first trip he had said to himself: “Shit! I don’t want to do anything else in my life but this.” For the next forty years, with a passion that had no future, he did nothing but keep the promise to die of his convictions. At the age of fifty-two he fell from his artificial paradise and was struck down by a massive heart attack.
Nanchi—the most peaceable man in the world—stayed on in the army after his obligatory military service, excelled in all kinds of modern weaponry, participated in numerous war games, but never took part in any of our many chronic wars. He settled for being a firefighter when he left the army, but there too he never had occasion to put out a single fire in more than five years. But he did not feel frustrated, because of a sense of humor that made him famous in the family as a master of the instant joke, and allowed him to be happy because of the mere fact of being alive.
Yiyo, in the most difficult years of poverty, became a writer and journalist by sheer hard work, without ever having smoked or taken a drink too many in his life. His irresistible literary vocation and concealed creativity stood firm against adversity. He died at the age of fifty-four, almost not enough time to publish a book of more than six hundred pages of masterful research into the secret life of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which he had worked on for years without my knowing about it and without ever making a direct inquiry of me.
Rita, early in her adolescence, knew how to learn from other people’s experience. When I returned to my parents’ house after a long absence, I found her suffering the same purgatory that all the girls had suffered because of her love for a good-looking, serious, and decent dark-skinned man whose only incompatibility with her was a height of some fifty centimeters. That same night I found my father listening to the news on his hammock in the bedroom. I turned down the volume, sat on the bed facing him, and asked him with my right of primogeniture what was going on with Rita’s boyfriend. He fired the answer at me that he no doubt had always anticipated.
“The only thing going on is that the guy’s a thief.”
Just what I expected.
“What kind of thief?” I asked him.
“A thief thief,” he said, still not looking at me.
“But what has he stolen?” I asked him without mercy.
He still did not look at me.
“Well,” he said at last with a sigh. “Not him, but he has a brother who’s in jail for stealing.”
“Then there’s no problem,” I said with easy imbecility, “because Rita doesn’t want to marry him but the one who’s not in jail.”
He did not reply. His well-proven honesty had gone astray beginning with the first answer, because he also knew that the rumor about the imprisoned brother was not true. With no further arguments, he tried to cling to the myth of dignity.
“All right, but they should marry right away, because I don’t want long engagements in this house.”
My reply was immediate and had a lack of charity that I have never forgiven myself for:
“Tomorrow, first thing.”
“Man! There’s no need to exaggerate!” Papá replied, startled but smiling his earlier smile. “That girl doesn’t even have anything to wear yet.”
The last time I saw Aunt Pa, when she was almost ninety years old, was on an afternoon when the heat was hideous and she arrived unannounced in Cartagena. She had traveled from Riohacha in an express taxi, carrying a student’s schoolbag and wearing strict mourning and a black cloth turban. She entered the house happy, her arms spread wide, and shouted to everyone:
“I’ve come to say goodbye because I’m going to die now.”
We took her in not only because she was who she was, but because we knew to what extent she understood her dealings with death. She stayed in the house, waiting for her time in the little maid’s room, the only one she would agree to sleep in, and there she died in the odor of chastity at an age that we calculated to be a hundred and one years old.
That period was the most intense at El Universal. Zabala guided me with his political knowledge so that my pieces would say what they had to and not collide with the censor’s pencil, and for the first time he was interested in my
old idea of writing feature articles for the paper. A dreadful subject soon arose when tourists were attacked by sharks on the beaches of Marbella. But the most original idea that occurred to the municipality was to offer fifty pesos for each dead shark, and on the following day there were not enough branches on the almond trees to display the ones captured during the night. Héctor Rojas Herazo, collapsing with laughter, wrote from Bogotá in his new column in El Tiempo a mocking note about the blunder of applying to the shark hunt the timeworn method of barking up the wrong tree. This gave me the idea of writing an article about the nocturnal hunt. Zabala supported me with enthusiasm, but my failure began from the moment I set foot on the boat and they asked me if I got seasick and I answered no; if I was afraid of the ocean and the truth was yes but again I said no; and the last question was if I knew how to swim—it should have been the first—and I did not dare tell the lie that I did. In any event, on solid ground and in a conversation with sailors, I learned that the hunters went to Bocas de Ceniza, eighty-nine nautical miles from Cartagena, and returned loaded down with innocent sharks to sell as criminals at fifty pesos each. The big news ended that same day, and my hope for the article ended too. In its place I published story number eight: “Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait.” At least two serious critics and my uncompromising friends in Barranquilla judged it a good change of direction.
I do not believe I had enough political maturity to be affected, but the truth is that I suffered a relapse similar to the previous one. I felt so bogged down that my only diversion was to stay up all night singing with the drunks in Las Bóvedas, the vaults at the walls, which had been soldiers’ brothels during the colonial period and then a sinister political prison. General Francisco de Paula Santander had served an eight-month sentence there before he was exiled to Europe by his comrades in cause and in arms.
The custodian of those historical relics was a retired linotypist whose active colleagues met there with him after the papers went to press to celebrate the new day every day with a demijohn of clandestine white rum made by the arts of horse thieves. They were educated typographers by family tradition, dramatic grammarians, and great Saturday drinkers. I joined their brotherhood.
The youngest was named Guillermo Dávila, and he had accomplished the feat of working on the coast in spite of the intransigence of some regional leaders who resisted admitting Cachacos into the brotherhood. Perhaps he accomplished this by means of the art of his art, because in addition to his good trade and personal charm he was a marvelous illusionist. He kept us dazzled with the magical mischief of making live birds come out of desk drawers or leaving the paper blank on which the editorial was written that we had just turned in as the edition was about to close. Maestro Zabala, so uncompromising in his duty, forgot for an instant about Paderewski and the proletarian revolution, and requested applause for the magician with the warning, always repeated and always disobeyed, that this was the last time. For me, sharing the daily routine with a magician was like discovering reality at last.
On one of those dawns in Las Bóvedas, Dávila told me his idea of putting out a newspaper measuring twenty-four by twenty-four—half a standard sheet of paper—that would be distributed free of charge at the busy time in the afternoons when businesses closed. It would be the smallest newspaper in the world, meant to be read in ten minutes. And it was. It was called Comprimido (Condensed), I wrote it in an hour at eleven in the morning, Dávila typeset and printed it in two hours, and a daring newsboy who did not even have enough breath to shout its name more than once handed it out.
It came out on Tuesday, September 18, 1951, and it is impossible to conceive of a more overwhelming or short-lived success: three editions in three days. Dávila confessed to me that not even with an act of black magic would he have been able to conceive of so great an idea at so little cost, that would fit into so small a space, be executed in so short a time, and disappear with such great speed. The strangest thing was that for an instant on the second day, intoxicated by the scramble of takers on the street and the fervor of fans, I came to think that the solution to my life might be this simple. The dream lasted until Thursday, when the manager showed us that one more edition would leave us bankrupt even if we decided to publish advertisements, for they would have to be so small and so expensive there was no rational solution. The very concept of the paper, based on its size, brought with it the mathematical seed of its own destruction: the more it sold the more unaffordable it was.
I was left in a difficult position. The move to Cartagena had been opportune and useful after my experience on Crónica, and it also provided a very favorable environment for continuing to write Leaf Storm, above all because of the creative fever with which we lived in our house, where the most unusual things always seemed possible. It would be enough for me to recall a lunch when we were talking to my papá about the difficulty many writers had in writing their memoirs when they no longer could remember anything. Cuqui, just six years old, drew the conclusion with masterful simplicity:
“Then,” he said, “the first thing a writer ought to write is his memoirs, when he can still remember everything.”
I did not dare confess that the same thing that had happened to me with La casa was happening with Leaf Storm: I was becoming more interested in the technique than in the subject. After a year of working with so much euphoria, the novel revealed itself to me as a circular labyrinth without an entrance or an exit. Today I believe I know why. The costumbrismo* that offered such good examples of renovation in its origins had, in the end, fossilized the great national themes that were trying to open emergency exits. The fact is I could not bear another minute of uncertainty. I only needed to verify some information and make some stylistic decisions before putting in the final period, and still I could not feel it breathing. But I was so bogged down after so much time working in the dark that I saw the book foundering and did not know where the cracks were. The worst thing was that at this point in the writing no one could help me, because the fissures were not in the text but inside me, and only I had the eyes to see them and the heart to endure them. Perhaps for this same reason I suspended “La Jirafa” without thinking too much about it when I finished paying El Heraldo the advance I had used to buy the furniture.
Sad to say, neither ingenuity, resistance, nor love were enough to defeat poverty. Everything seemed to favor it. The census had ended after a year, and my salary at El Universal was not enough to compensate. I did not return to the faculty of law in spite of the stratagems of certain teachers who had conspired to move me ahead despite my disinterest in their interest and erudition. At home everyone’s money was not enough, but the hole was so large that my contribution was never enough and the lack of hope affected me more than the lack of money.
“If we’re all going to drown,” I said at lunch on a decisive day, “let me save myself so I can at least try to send you a lifeboat.”
And so the first week in December I moved back to Barranquilla, with everyone resigned, certain the boat would come. Alfonso Fuenmayor must have imagined it at first glance when he saw me walk unannounced into our old office at El Heraldo, for the Crónica office had been left without funds. He looked up at me from his typewriter as if I were a ghost and exclaimed in alarm:
“What the hell are you doing here without letting anyone know!”
Few times in my life have I given an answer so close to the truth:
“It’s all a pain in my balls, Maestro.”
Alfonso calmed down.
“Ah, good!” he replied in his usual way, citing the most Colombian line from the national anthem. “It’s our good fortune: that’s how all of humankind is, moaning in their chains.”
He did not show the slightest curiosity about the reason for my trip. It seemed like a kind of telepathy to him, because he had told everyone who had asked about me in recent months that at any moment I would be coming back to stay. He was happy as he got up from his desk and put on his jacket, because I had arr
ived like a gift from heaven. He was half an hour late for an appointment, he had not finished the next day’s editorial, and he asked me to finish it for him. I just had time to ask him what the subject was, and as he ran down the hallway he answered in an offhand manner that was typical of the way we were friends:
“Read it and you’ll find out.”
The next day there were two typewriters facing each other again in the office of El Heraldo, and I was writing “La Jirafa” again for the same page. And—of course!—at the same price. And with the same close association between Alfonso and me, in which many editorials had paragraphs by one or the other and it was impossible to distinguish them. Some students of journalism or of literature have tried to differentiate them in the archives and have not been able to, except in the case of specific subjects, not because of the style but because of the cultural information.
At El Tercer Hombre I was saddened by the bad news that they had killed our friend the thief. On a night like every other he had gone out to ply his trade, and the only thing anyone knew, with no further details, was that he had been shot through the heart in the house that he was robbing. The body was claimed by an older sister, his sole relative, and only we and the owner of the tavern attended his charity funeral.
I returned to the house of the Ávila sisters. Meira Delmar, my neighbor once again, continued purifying my bad nights at El Gato Negro with her tranquil evenings. She and her sister Alicia seemed like twins because of their natures, and because they made time circular for us when we were with them. In some very special way they were still in the group. At least once a year they invited us to a meal of Arab delicacies that nourished our soul, and in their house there were unexpected evenings with illustrious visitors, from great artists in any genre to mad poets. I think they and Maestro Pedro Biava were the ones who imposed order on my misguided melomania and enrolled me in the happy crowd at the arts center.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 45
