Today it seems to me that Barranquilla gave me a better perspective on Leaf Storm, for as soon as I had a desk and typewriter, I began correcting it with renewed energy. At this time I dared to show the group the first legible copy, knowing it was not finished. We had talked so much about it that there was no need for any kind of warning. Alfonso spent two days writing across from me without even mentioning it. By the third day, when we had finished our assignments late in the afternoon, he put the rough draft on his desk and read the pages he had marked with slips of paper. More than a critic, he seemed like a tracker of the inconsequential and a purifier of style. His observations were so unerring that I used them all, except one that seemed farfetched to him even after I proved that it was a real episode from my childhood.
“Even reality is mistaken when the literature is bad,” he said, weak with laughter.
Germán Vargas’s method was that if the text was all right he made no immediate comments but gave a soothing opinion and ended with an exclamation point:
“Damn fine!”
But in the days that followed he kept throwing out strings of scattered ideas about the book, which would culminate on some night of drinking with a well-aimed opinion. If he did not like the rough draft, he met with the author alone and told him so with so much frankness and elegance that the apprentice could only thank him with all his heart even though he wanted to cry. That was not the case with me. On a day when I did not anticipate it, Germán made a half-joking, half-serious comment about my rough draft that returned my soul to my body.
Álvaro had disappeared from the Japy without any signs of life. Almost a week later, when I least expected it, he blocked my way with his car on the Paseo Bolívar, and shouted in his best manner:
“Get in, Maestro, I’m going to fuck you over for being an idiot!”
It was his anesthetic sentence. We drove without a destination around the business center, burning in the summer heat, while Álvaro shouted a somewhat emotional but impressive analysis of his reading. He interrupted it each time he saw someone he knew on the sidewalk in order to yell a cordial or mocking absurdity at him, and then resumed his impassioned harangue, with his voice cracking with the strain, his hair disheveled, and those bulging eyes that seemed to look at me through the bars of a panopticon. We ended up drinking cold beer on the terrace of Los Almendros, overwhelmed by the shrieking fans of Junior and Sporting across the street, and then overrun by the avalanche of maniacs who escaped from the stadium deflated by a contemptible score of 2–2. At the last minute Álvaro called his only definitive opinion about the rough draft of my book through the car window:
“In any case, Maestro, you still have a lot of costumbrismo!”
Grateful, I managed to shout back:
“But it’s the good Faulkner kind!”
And he put an end to everything not said or thought with a phenomenal guffaw:
“Don’t be a sonuvabitch!”
Fifty years later, whenever I remember that afternoon, I can hear his explosive outburst of laughter again, resonating like a shower of stones on the burning street.
It was clear to me that the three of them had liked the novel, with their personal and perhaps correct reservations, but they did not say it in so many words, perhaps because that seemed like an easy tactic to them. No one talked about publishing it, which was also very typical of them, for whom the important thing was writing well. The rest was a matter for publishers.
Which is to say: I was back again in our same old Barranquilla, but my misfortune was my awareness that this time I would not have the heart to go on with “La Jirafa.” In reality it had fulfilled its mission of imposing on me a daily job of carpentry so I could learn how to write, starting from zero, with tenacity and the fierce aspiration to be a distinctive writer. On many occasions I could not handle the subject, and I would change it for another when I realized it was still too big for me. In any case, it was essential gymnastics for my formation as a writer, with the comfortable certainty that it was no more than a source of nourishment without any historical commitment.
The simple search for a daily subject had made my first few months bitter. It did not leave me time for anything else: I lost hours scrutinizing other newspapers, I took notes on private conversations, I became lost in fantasies that disturbed my sleep until real life came out to meet me. In that sense, my happiest experience occurred one afternoon when I saw from a passing bus a simple sign on the door of a house: “Funeral palms for sale.”
My first impulse was to knock at the door in order to ascertain the facts of that discovery, but shyness vanquished me. And so life itself taught me that one of the most useful secrets for writing is to learn to read the hieroglyphs of reality without knocking or asking anything. In recent years this became much clearer to me when I reread the more than four hundred published “jirafas” and compared them to some of the literary texts they had given rise to.
At Christmas the staff of El Espectador arrived on vacation, beginning with the publisher Don Gabriel Cano, with all his children: Luis Gabriel, the manager; Guillermo, who was then deputy editor; Alfonso, the assistant manager, and Fidel, the youngest, an apprentice in everything. With them was Eduardo Zalamea, Ulises, who had a special value for me because of the publication of my stories and his introductory note. It was their custom to enjoy as a group the first week of the new year at Pradomar, a resort ten leagues from Barranquilla, where they took over the bar by storm. The only thing I recall with any precision in that tumult is that Ulises in person was one of the great surprises of my life. I had often seen him in Bogotá, at first in El Molino and years later in El Automático, and sometimes at Maestro de Greiff’s tertulia. I remembered his unsociable appearance and his metal voice, and on that basis I concluded that he was bad-tempered, which no doubt was the reputation he had among the good readers at the university. As a consequence I had avoided him on various occasions in order not to contaminate the image I had invented for my own personal use. I was mistaken. He was one of the most affectionate and obliging people I can remember, though I understand he needed a special reason of the mind or heart. His temperament was nothing like that of Don Ramón Vinyes, Álvaro Mutis, or León de Greiff, but he shared with them an innate aptitude for teaching at any hour, and the uncommon luck of having read all the books that had to be read.
I became more than a friend of the younger Canos—Luis Gabriel, Guillermo, Alfonso, and Fidel—when I worked as a reporter at El Espectador. It would be reckless to try to recall any dialogue from those free-for-all conversations during the nights in Pradomar, but it would also be impossible to forget their unbearable insistence on the mortal sickness of journalism and literature. They made me another member of the family and their personal storyteller, discovered and adopted by them and for them. But I do not remember—as has been said so often—anybody even suggesting that I go to work with them. I did not regret it, because at that bad moment I did not have the slightest idea what my destiny would be or if I would be allowed to choose it.
Álvaro Mutis, enthusiastic about the enthusiasm of the Canos, returned to Barranquilla when he was named head of public relations for Colombian Esso and tried to persuade me to work with him in Bogotá. His real mission, however, was much more dramatic: through a terrifying error by some local concessionaire, the tanks at the airport had been filled with gasoline for cars instead of planes, and it was unthinkable that an aircraft filled with that mistaken fuel could go anywhere. Mutis’s job was to correct the mistake in absolute secrecy before dawn without the airport officials finding out, much less the press. And he did. The fuel was changed to the correct kind in four hours of conversation and whiskey at the storage tanks of the local airport. We had more than enough time to talk about everything, but the unimaginable subject for me was that Editorial Losada of Buenos Aires would publish the novel I was about to finish. Álvaro Mutis knew this from direct communication with the new manager of Losada in Bogotá, Julio César Villegas, a former mi
nister of the government of Peru who had taken refuge not long before in Colombia.
I do not remember a more intense emotion. Editorial Losada was one of the best in Buenos Aires, filling the publishing vacuum created by the Spanish Civil War. Its editors nourished us on a daily basis with new books that were so interesting and unusual we almost had no time to read them. Its salespeople were punctual in bringing us the books we had ordered, and we welcomed them as messengers of joy. The mere idea that one of them might publish Leaf Storm almost drove me mad. As soon as I said goodbye to Mutis in a plane filled with the correct fuel, I ran to the paper to do a thorough revision of the original.
In the days that followed I dedicated all my time to the frantic examination of a text that very well might have gotten away from me. There were no more than one hundred twenty double-spaced pages, but I made so many adjustments, changes, and inventions that I never knew if I left it better or worse. Germán and Alfonso reread the most critical parts and had the kindness not to make irredeemable observations. In that state of apprehension I revised the final version, my heart in my hand, and made the serene decision not to publish it. In the future, this would become a mania. Once I felt satisfied with a completed book, I was left with the devastating impression that I would not be able to write another one that was better.
It was my good fortune that Álvaro Mutis suspected the reason for my delay, and he flew to Barranquilla to take the only clean copy and have it sent to Buenos Aires, not giving me time for a final reading. Commercial photocopiers did not exist yet, and the only thing I had was the first rough draft corrected in the margins and between the lines with inks in different colors to avoid confusion. I threw it in the trash and did not recover my tranquility for the two long months it took to receive their answer.
One day I was handed a letter at El Heraldo that had been mislaid on the desk of the editor-in-chief. The imprint of Editorial Losada of Buenos Aires froze my heart, but I was too shy to open it there and I went to my private cubicle. And so I faced without witnesses the unadorned notification that Leaf Storm had been rejected. I did not have to read the entire verdict to feel its brutal impact and know I was going to die then and there.
The letter was the supreme judgment of Don Guillermo de Torre, president of the editorial board, and it was supported by a series of simple arguments resonant with the diction, emphasis, and smugness of white men from Castilla. The only consolation was the surprising final concession: “One must recognize in the author his excellent gifts as an observer and a poet.” Even today, however, it surprises me that beyond my own consternation and shame, even the most acidic objections seemed relevant.
I never made a copy of the letter or knew what happened to it after it circulated for several months among my friends in Barranquilla, who summoned all kinds of soothing reasons to try to console me. Of course, fifty years later, when I tried to obtain a copy in order to document these memoirs, not a trace of it was to be found in the publishing house in Buenos Aires. I do not remember if it was published as a news item, though I never intended it to be, but I do know that I needed a long time to recover my spirits after losing my temper and writing a furious letter that was published without my authorization. This breach of trust caused me even greater sorrow, because my final reaction had been to take advantage of what was useful to me in the verdict, correct everything that in my judgment was correctable, and move ahead.
The opinions of Germán Vargas, Alfonso Fuenmayor, and Álvaro Cepeda gave me the greatest encouragement. I found Alfonso at a food stand in the public market, where he had discovered an oasis for reading in the bustle of trade. I asked him if I should leave my novel as it was or try to rewrite it with a different structure, because it seemed to me that the second half lost the tension of the first. Alfonso listened with a certain impatience, and gave me his verdict.
“Look, Maestro,” he said at last, like a complete teacher, “Guillermo de Torre is as respectable as he believes himself to be, but I don’t think he’s very up-to-date on the modern novel.”
In other conversations that I had at the time, I was comforted by the precedent of Guillermo de Torre rejecting the original of Pablo Neruda’s Residence on Earth, in 1927. Fuenmayor thought my novel might have met a different fate if the reader had been Jorge Luis Borges, but then the devastation would have been worse if he had rejected it too.
“So don’t fuck around anymore,” Alfonso concluded. “Your novel is as good as we thought it was, and the only thing you have to do, starting right now, is to go on writing.”
Germán—faithful to his prudent ways—did me the favor of not exaggerating. He thought the novel was not so bad that it should not be published on a continent where the genre was in crisis, and not so good that it was worth provoking an international scandal in which the only loser would be an unknown novice writer. Álvaro Cepeda summarized the opinion of Guillermo de Torre with another of his florid memorials:
“It’s just that Spaniards are very stupid.”
When I realized I did not have a clean copy of my novel, Editorial Losada let me know by a third or fourth party that it was their practice not to return originals. It was a stroke of luck that Julio César Villegas had made a copy before forwarding mine to Buenos Aires, and he sent it to me. Then I began another correction based on my friends’ conclusions. I eliminated a long episode in which the female protagonist contemplated a three-day rainstorm from the hallway of the begonias, which I later turned into the “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo.” I dropped a superfluous dialogue between the grandfather and Colonel Aureliano Buendía a short time before the slaughter of the banana workers, and some thirty pages that interfered in form and substance with the unified structure of the novel. Almost twenty years later, when I believed they were forgotten, parts of those fragments helped me sustain nostalgic memories throughout the length and breadth of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I had almost overcome the blow when the news was published that the Colombian novel selected instead of mine for publication by Editorial Losada was Christ with His Back Turned, by Eduardo Caballero Calderón. It was an error, or a truth falsified in bad faith, because it was not a question of a contest but rather a scheme of Editorial Losada to enter the Colombian market with Colombian authors, and my novel was not rejected in competition with any other but because Don Guillermo de Torre did not consider it publishable.
My consternation was greater than I recognized at the time, and I did not have the courage to endure it if I did not convince myself. And so I dropped in unannounced to see my childhood friend, Luis Carmelo Correa, on the Sevilla banana plantation—a few leagues from Cataca—where he worked as a part-time comptroller and fiscal auditor. We spent two days recapitulating once again our shared childhood, as we always did. His memory, his intuition, and his frankness were so revelatory that they caused a certain terror in me. As we spoke, he used his toolbox to make repairs on the house, and I listened to him from a hammock rocked by the tenuous breeze of the plantations. Nena Sánchez, his wife, weak with laughter in the kitchen, corrected our wild ideas and lapses of memory. At last, in a stroll of reconciliation through the deserted streets of Aracataca, I understood to what extent I had recovered my good spirits, and I had no doubt at all that Leaf Storm—rejected or not—was the book I had intended to write after the trip with my mother.
Encouraged by that experience, I went to find Rafael Escalona in his paradise in Valledupar, trying to dig into my world down to the roots. It did not surprise me, because it was as if I had already lived everything I found, everything that happened, all the people I encountered, not in another life but in the one that I was living. Later, on one of my countless trips, I met Colonel Clemente Escalona, Rafael’s father, who impressed me from the first with his dignity and old-fashioned patriarch’s bearing. He was as slim and straight as a reed, with weather-beaten skin, prominent bones, and perfect dignity. From the time I was very young I had been pursued by the subject of the an
guish and decorum with which my grandparents waited until the end of their long lives for the veteran’s pension. But four years later, when at last I was writing the book in an old hotel in Paris, the image I always had in mind was not my grandfather but Don Clemente Escalona as the physical replica of the colonel who had nobody to write to him.
I learned from Rafael Escalona that Manuel Zapata Olivella had set up practice as a doctor to the poor in the town of La Paz, a few kilometers from Valledupar, and that was where we went. We arrived at dusk, and there was something in the air that made it difficult to breathe. Zapata and Escalona reminded me that only twenty days earlier the town had been the victim of an assault by the police who were sowing terror in the region in order to impose the will of the government. It was a night of horror. They killed at random and set fire to fifteen houses.
Because of the iron censorship we had not learned the truth. But at the time I did not even have the opportunity to imagine it. Juan López, the best musician in the region, had left never to return after that black night. In his house we asked Pablo, his younger brother, to play for us, and with intrepid simplicity he said:
“I’ll never sing again in my life.”
Then we learned that not only he but all the musicians in the town had put away their accordions, their bass drums, their guacharacas,* and had not sung again out of grief for their dead. It was understandable, and Escalona himself, who was the teacher of many of them, and Zapata Olivella, who was beginning to be the physician to all of them, could not persuade anyone to sing.
Faced with our insistence, the neighbors came to give their reasons, but at the bottom of their hearts they felt that the mourning could not go on any longer. “It’s like having died along with the dead,” said a woman who wore a red rose behind her ear. People supported her. Then Pablo López must have felt authorized to wring the neck of his grief, for without saying a word he went into his house and came out with his accordion. He sang as never before, and as he sang other musicians began to arrive. Someone opened the store across the way and offered drinks on the house. The other stores started to open after a month of mourning, and the lights were turned on, and we all sang. Half an hour later the entire town was singing. On the empty square the first drunk in a month came out, and at the top of his lungs he sang one of Escalona’s songs, dedicated to Escalona himself in homage to the miracle of his having resuscitated the town.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 46
