It was fortunate that life went on in the rest of the world. Two months after the rejection of the manuscript I met Julio César Villegas, who had broken with Editorial Losada and been named the representative in Colombia of Editorial González Porto, which sold encyclopedias and scientific and technical books on the installment plan. Villegas was the tallest and strongest man, the most resourceful when faced with the worst dangers of real life, an immoderate consumer of the most expensive whiskeys, an ineluctable conversationalist, and a salon fabulist. On the night of our first meeting in the presidential suite of the hotel in El Prado, I staggered out carrying a traveling salesman’s case filled with advertising brochures and samples of illustrated encyclopedias and books on medicine, law, and engineering from Editorial González Porto. After the second whiskey I had agreed to transform myself into a seller of books on the installment plan in the province of Padilla, from Valledupar to La Guajira. My earnings were an advance in cash on a twenty-percent commission, which I had to earn in order to live without difficulties after paying my expenses, including the hotel.
This is the trip that I myself made legendary because of the incorrigible defect of not weighing my adjectives in time. The legend is that it was planned as a mythic expedition in search of my roots in the land of my elders, following the same romantic itinerary as my mother when her mother took her away to save her from the telegraph operator in Aracataca. The truth is that mine was not one trip but two, which were very brief and bewildering.
On the second trip I returned only to the towns around Valledupar. Once there, of course, I anticipated continuing on to Cabo de la Vela on the same route as my enamored mother, but I only got as far as Manaure de la Sierra, La Paz, and Villanueva, a few leagues from Valledupar. At that time I did not know San Juan del César, or Barrancas, where my grandparents married and my mother was born, and where Colonel Nicolás Márquez killed Medardo Pacheco; I did not even visit Riohacha, which is the embryo of my tribe, until 1984, when President Belisario Betancur sent a group of invited friends from Bogotá to inaugurate the coal mines in Cerrejón. It was my first trip to my imaginary Guajira, which seemed as mythic as the one I had so often described without knowing it, though I do not think it was on account of my false recollections but because of the memory of the Indians my grandfather had purchased for a hundred pesos each for the house in Aracataca. My greatest surprise, of course, was my first glimpse of Riohacha, the city of sand and salt where my people had been born since my great-great-grandparents, where my grandmother saw the Virgen de los Remedios put out the flame in the oven with an icy breath when the bread was about to burn, where my grandfather fought his wars and suffered prison for a crime of love, and where I was conceived on my parents’ honeymoon.
In Valledupar I did not have much time at my disposal for selling books. I was staying at the Hotel Wellcome, a stupendous, well-preserved colonial mansion on the main square, which had a long bower of palm in the courtyard with rustic tables at the bar and hammocks hanging from hooks. Víctor Cohen, the proprietor, was as vigilant as Cerberus about the order of his house, as well as his moral reputation when it was threatened by dissipated strangers. He was also a purist concerning the language, and he would declaim Cervantes from memory with a lisping Castilian accent, and place García Lorca’s morality in dispute. I got along well with him because of his knowledge of Don Andrés Bello and his rigorous recitations of Colombian romantics, and did not get on with him because of his obsession with stopping infractions of the moral codes within the pure environs of his hotel. All this began in a very simple way because he was an old friend of my uncle Juan de Dios, and took pleasure in evoking his memories.
For me that shed in the courtyard was a stroke of luck, because the many hours I had to spare I spent reading in a hammock in the suffocating heat of midday. In times of famine I even read treatises on surgery and accounting manuals, not thinking they would be of use to me in my adventures as a writer. The work was almost spontaneous, because most of my clients were connected somehow to the Iguarán and Cotes clans, and one visit that would last until lunch, evoking family secrets, was enough. Some signed the contract without reading it so as to be on time since the rest of the tribe was waiting for us to have lunch in the shade of the accordions. Between Valledupar and La Paz I reaped my great harvest in less than a week and returned to Barranquilla with the feeling that I had been in the only place in the world I really understood.
Very early on June 13, I was going somewhere on the bus when I learned that the Armed Forces had taken power in light of the disorder that reigned in the government and throughout the country. The year before, on September 6, a mob of Conservative thugs and uniformed police in Bogotá had set fire to the buildings of El Tiempo and El Espectador, the two most important daily papers in the country, and used guns in their attacks on the residences of former president Alfonso López Pumarejo, and Carlos Lleras Restrepo, president of the Liberal leadership. The latter, known as a politician with a hard character, managed to exchange shots with his attackers, but in the end he found himself obliged to escape over the walls of a nearby house. The situation of official violence that the country had endured since April 9 had become untenable.
Until dawn of that June 13, when the division general Gustavo Rojas Pinilla removed the acting president, Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez. Laureano Gómez, the titular president who had resigned on the advice of his doctors, then reassumed power in a wheelchair and tried to effect a coup against himself and govern for the fifteen months remaining in his constitutional term. But Rojas Pinilla and his staff had come to stay.
National backing was immediate and unanimous for the decision of the Constituent Assembly that legitimized the military coup. Rojas Pinilla was invested with powers until the end of the presidential term, in August of the following year, and Laureano Gómez traveled with his family to Benidorm, on the east coast of Spain, leaving behind the illusory impression that his times of raging fury had come to an end. The Liberal patriarchs proclaimed their support of national reconciliation with a call to their fellow party members fighting throughout the country. The most significant photograph that the newspapers printed in the days that followed was of an advance party of Liberals singing a lovers’ serenade under the balcony of the presidential bedroom. The homage was led by Don Roberto García Peña, publisher of El Tiempo and one of the fiercest opponents of the deposed regime.
In any case, the most moving photograph from those days showed the interminable line of Liberal guerrillas turning in their weapons on the eastern Llanos, commanded by Guadalupe Salcedo, whose image as a romantic bandit had touched in a profound way the hearts of Colombians punished by official violence. It was a new generation of guerrilla fighters against the Conservative regime, who were identified somehow as left over from the War of a Thousand Days and who maintained relations that were in no way clandestine with the legal heads of the Liberal Party.
At their head, Guadalupe Salcedo had disseminated a new mythic image to all levels in the country, those in favor of him and those opposed. Perhaps that was why—four years after his surrender—he was riddled with bullets by the police somewhere in Bogotá, in a place that has never been specified, under circumstances that have not been established with certainty.
The official date is June 6, 1957, and in a solemn ceremony his body was placed in a numbered crypt of the central cemetery in Bogotá, with well-known politicians in attendance. For Guadalupe Salcedo, from his fighting headquarters, maintained not only political but social relations with the leaders of a Liberalism in disgrace. But there are at least eight different versions of his death, and no lack of skeptics from that time and this who still wonder if the body was his and if in fact it is in the crypt where it was buried.
In that state of mind I set out on my second business trip to the Province, after confirming with Villegas that everything was in order. As I had the first time, I made very rapid sales in Valledupar to a clientele convinced ahead of time. I went w
ith Rafael Escalona and Poncho Cotes to Villanueva, La Paz, Patillal, and Manaure de la Sierra to visit veterinarians and agronomists. Some had spoken with buyers from my previous trip and were waiting for me with special orders. Any time of day was fine for organizing a fiesta with these same clients and their good-natured compadres, and we would stay up all night singing with the great accordion players, not interfering with commitments or the payment of urgent bills because ordinary life continued its natural rhythm in the uproar of our carousing. In Villanueva we were with an accordion player and two drummers who appeared to be the grandchildren of someone we had listened to as children in Aracataca. So that what had been a childhood enthusiasm was revealed to me on that trip as an inspired craft that would accompany me for the rest of my life.
This time I got to know Manaure, in the heart of the sierra, a beautiful and tranquil town, historic in my family because that was where they took my mother for a change of climate when she was a girl and had a tertian fever that resisted all kinds of potions. I had heard so much about Manaure, about its May afternoons and medicinal breakfasts, that when I was there for the first time I realized I remembered it as if I had known it in a former life.
We were having a cold beer in the only tavern in town when a man approached our table who looked like a tree, wore riding gaiters, and had a military revolver in his belt. Rafael Escalona introduced us, and he stood looking into my eyes, still holding my hand.
“Do you have anything to do with Colonel Nicolás Márquez?” he asked.
“I’m his grandson,” I told him.
“Then,” he said, “your grandfather killed my grandfather.”
That is to say, he was the grandson of Medardo Pacheco, the man my grandfather had killed in a duel. He did not give me time to be frightened because he said it in a very warm manner, as if this too was a way of being kin. We caroused with him for three days and three nights in his double-bottomed truck, drinking warm brandy and eating stewed goat in memory of our dead grandfathers. Several days went by before he confessed the truth: he had arranged with Escalona to frighten me, but he did not have the heart to go on with the jokes about our dead grandfathers. In reality his name was José Prudencio Aguilar, and he was a smuggler by trade, an upright and goodhearted man. In homage to him, and to even the score, in One Hundred Years of Solitude I gave his name to the rival killed with a lance by José Arcadio Buendía in the cockfighting pit.
The bad thing was that at the end of that nostalgic trip the books I had sold had not yet arrived, and without them I could not collect my advance. I was left without a céntimo and the hotel metronome was moving faster than my nights of fiesta. Víctor Cohen began to lose the little patience remaining to him because of the lie that I was squandering the money for his bill with low-class drunks and cheap sluts. The only thing that gave me back my peace of mind was the thwarted love affair in The Right to Be Born, the radio soap opera by Don Félix B. Caignet, whose popular impact revived my old illusions about sentimental literature. The unexpected reading of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which came as a surprise in the magazine Life en Español, completed my recovery from my sorrows.
In the same mail delivery the shipment of books arrived, which I had to distribute to their owners in order to collect my advance. Everyone paid on time, but by now I owed the hotel more than twice what I had earned, and Villegas warned me that I would not get anything else for another three weeks. Then I had a serious conversation with Víctor Cohen, and he accepted an IOU with a guarantor. Since Escalona and his crew were not available, a providential friend did that favor for me with no obligations, just because he had liked a story of mine published in Crónica. But at the moment of truth I could not pay anyone.
The IOU became historic years later when Víctor Cohen would show it to his friends and visitors, not as an accusatory document but as a trophy. The last time I saw him he was almost one hundred years old, tall, slim, and lucid, and with his sense of humor intact. Almost fifty years later, at the baptism of the son of my comadre Consuelo Araujonoguera, for whom I was godfather, I saw the unpaid IOU. Víctor Cohen showed it to anyone who wanted to see it, with his usual grace and courtesy. I was surprised by the neatness of the document he had written and the enormous will to pay that could be seen in the boldness of my signature. Víctor celebrated it that night by dancing a vallenato promenade with the kind of colonial elegance no one had brought to that dance since the days of Francisco el Hombre. When it was over, many friends thanked me for not having paid the IOU that had given rise to that priceless night.
The seductive magic of Dr. Villegas would produce even more, but not with books. It is not possible to forget the majestic skill with which he sidestepped creditors and the joy with which they understood his reasons for not paying on time. The most tempting of his subjects at the time had to do with the novel The Roads Have Been Closed, by the Barranquillan writer Olga Salcedo de Medina, which had provoked an uproar more social than literary, with few regional precedents. Inspired by the success of The Right to Be Born, which I had followed with growing interest for the entire month, I thought we were in the presence of a popular phenomenon we writers could not ignore. Without even referring to my debt, I had mentioned this to Villegas on my return from Valledupar, and he proposed that I write the adaptation with enough wickedness to triple the vast audience already caught up in the radio drama of Félix B. Caignet.
I made the adaptation for radio broadcast in two weeks of seclusion that seemed much more revelatory than I had anticipated, with measured dialogues, degrees of intensity, and situations and quick tempos that in no way resembled anything I had written before. With my inexperience in dialogue—which still is not my forte—the effort was valuable and I was more grateful for what I learned than for what I earned. But I had no complaints about that either, because Villegas advanced me half the amount in cash and agreed to cancel my earlier debt with the first income from the soap opera.
It was recorded at the Atlántico station, with the best possible regional distribution, and directed without experience or inspiration by Villegas himself. For the narrator, Germán Vargas had been recommended as a speaker who would be distinctive because of the contrast between his sobriety and the stridency of local radio. The first great surprise was that Germán agreed, and the second was that after the first rehearsal he concluded he was not the right person. Then Villegas in person assumed responsibility for the narration with his Andean cadence and hisses, which in the end denatured that bold adventure.
The entire soap opera was recorded with more grief than glory, and it was a brilliant classroom for my insatiable ambitions as a narrator in any genre. I attended the recordings, which were made directly onto the blank disc with a needle like a plow that left tufts of black, luminous, almost invisible filaments, like angel hair. Each night I took home a large handful that I distributed to my friends as an unusual trophy. With untold difficulties and shoddy work, the soap opera was aired at the same time as a colossal party very typical of the promoter.
No one could invent even a pro forma argument to make me believe that anyone liked it, but it had a good audience and enough of a publicity campaign to save face. It was my good fortune that it infused me with new energy in a genre that seemed to be racing toward unimaginable horizons. My gratitude to and admiration for Don Félix B. Caignet reached the point where I asked him for a private interview some ten years later, when I lived for a few months in Havana as a reporter at the Cuban agency Prensa Latina. But despite all kinds of arguments and pretexts, he never would see me, and all I had from him was a brilliant lesson that I read in one of his interviews: “People always want to cry: the only thing I do is give them an excuse.” And Villegas’s magic spells produced nothing else. There were complications with Editorial González Porto—as there had been earlier with Losada—and there was no way to settle our final accounts because he abandoned his dreams of greatness and returned to his country.
Álvaro Cepeda Samudio took
me out of purgatory with his old idea of transforming El Nacional into the modern newspaper he had learned how to make in the United States. Until then, aside from his occasional contributions to Crónica, which always were literary, he had only had the opportunity to use his degree from Columbia University in the condensed pieces he would send to The Sporting News, in St. Louis, Missouri. At last, in 1953, our friend Julián Davis Echandía, who had been Álvaro’s first employer, called to ask him to take charge of the general management of his evening paper, El Nacional. Álvaro himself had disturbed him with the astronomical project he presented to him on his return from New York, but once the mastodon had been captured he called to ask me to help him carry it, with no titles or specified duties, but with an advance on my first paycheck that was enough for me to live on even without collecting my entire salary.
It was a fatal adventure. Álvaro had formulated the entire plan with models from the United States. Davis Echandía was like God on high, a precursor from the heroic days of local sensationalist journalism and the least decipherable man I ever knew, good by birth and more sentimental than compassionate. The rest of the staff were a boisterous crop of great hard-hitting reporters, all of them friends and colleagues of many years’ standing. In theory each one had his well-defined orbit, but beyond that no one ever knew who did what, so that the enormous technical mastodon never managed to even take its first step. The few issues that were put out were the result of a heroic act, but no one ever knew whose. When it was time to go to press, the plates were out of order. Urgent material would disappear, and we would go mad with rage. I do not recall the paper ever coming out on time and without corrections, on account of the crouching devils we had in the printing facilities. No one ever knew what happened. The prevailing explanation was perhaps the least perverse: some aging veterans could not tolerate the renovatory regime and conspired with their soulmates until they succeeded in destroying the enterprise.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 47
