It was the first prosperity in my life, but I had no time to enjoy it. The apartment that I rented furnished, with laundry service, was no more than a bedroom with a bath, telephone, breakfast in bed, and a large window looking out on the eternal drizzle of the saddest city in the world. I used it only for sleeping from three in the morning, after I had read for an hour, until the morning newscasts on the radio would orient me to the actuality of the new day.
I did not stop thinking with a certain disquiet that it was the first time I had my own fixed place to live but had no time even to think about it. I was so busy dealing with my new life that my only notable expense was the lifeboat I sent without fail at the end of the month to my family. I realize only today that I almost had no time to think about my private life. Perhaps because there survived inside me the idea of Caribbean mothers that women from Bogotá gave themselves without love to men from the coast only to fulfill their dream of living by the ocean. But in my first bachelor apartment in Bogotá, I accomplished this without risk when I asked the porter if visits from female friends at midnight were permitted, and he gave me this wise reply:
“It’s prohibited, Señor, but I don’t see what I shouldn’t.”
At the end of July, without prior warning, José Salgar stopped in front of my desk as I was writing an editorial and looked at me in a long silence. I stopped in the middle of a sentence and said to him, intrigued:
“What’s going on!”
He did not even blink, playing an invisible bolero with his red pencil, wearing a diabolical smile whose purpose was far too noticeable. He explained without being asked that he had not authorized me to write the article on the massacre of the students on Carrera Séptima because it was a difficult assignment for a beginner. On the other hand, he would offer me, on his own responsibility, the reporter’s diploma, in a direct way but without the slightest spirit of a challenge, if I was capable of accepting a mortal proposition from him:
“Why don’t you go to Medellín and tell us what the hell it was that happened there?”
It was not easy to understand, because he was talking about something that had occurred more than two weeks earlier, which allowed the suspicion that the news was stale beyond recovery. It was known that on the morning of July 12 there had been a landslide in La Media Luna, a steep, craggy place in the east of Medellín, but the outrage in the press, the disorder among the authorities, and the panic of those injured had caused administrative and humanitarian confusions that obscured the reality. Salgar did not ask me to try to establish as far as possible what had happened, he ordered me flat out to reconstruct the whole truth and nothing but the truth on the site, and in a minimum amount of time. But something in the way he said it made me think that at last he had loosened the rein.
Until then the only thing everyone knew about Medellín was that Carlos Gardel had died there, burned to a crisp in an aerial catastrophe. I knew it was a land of great writers and poets, and that the Colegio de la Presentación, where Mercedes Barcha had begun to study that year, was located there. Faced with so delirious a mission, it no longer seemed unattainable to reconstruct, piece by piece, the calamity of a mountain. And so I landed in Medellín at eleven in the morning, in a rainstorm so frightening I deceived myself into thinking I would be the final victim of the landslide.
I left my suitcase in the Hotel Nutibara, with clothing for two days and an emergency tie, and went out to the street in an idyllic city still clouded over with the remnants of the storm. Álvaro Mutis had made the trip to help me endure my fear of planes, and he put me on the track of well-placed people in the life of the city. But the chilling truth was that I did not have the slightest idea of where to begin. I wandered streets radiant under the golden dust of a splendid sun following the storm, and after an hour I had to take shelter in the first store I came to because it started raining again while the sun was shining. Then I began to feel the first flutterings of panic in my chest. I tried to repress them with my grandfather’s magic formula in the middle of combat, but in the end my fear of fear overcame my morale. I realized I would never be able to do what I had been assigned to do, and I had not had the courage to say so. Then I understood that the only sensible thing would be to write a letter of thanks to Guillermo Cano and go back to Barranquilla and the state of grace in which I had found myself six months earlier.
With the immense relief of having come out of hell, I took a taxi to go back to the hotel. The midday newscaster made a long commentary at the top of his voice, as if the landslides had happened yesterday. The driver almost shouted as he gave vent to his feelings about the negligence of the government and the poor handling of relief for the injured, and somehow I felt responsible for his righteous anger. But then it cleared again, and the air became diaphanous and fragrant because of the explosion of flowers in Parque Berrío. All of a sudden, I do not know why, I felt the onset of madness.
“Let’s do this,” I said to the driver. “Before we go to the hotel, take me to the place where the landslides happened.”
“But there’s nothing to see there,” he said. “Just lit candles and little crosses for the dead they haven’t been able to get out.”
This was how I learned that victims as well as survivors came from different parts of the city, and the survivors had walked across town en masse to recover the bodies of those killed in the first slide. The great tragedy occurred when curious onlookers overran the site, and another part of the mountain slid down in a devastating avalanche. So that the only people who could tell the story were the few who had escaped successive slides and were alive at the other end of the city.
“I understand,” I told the driver, trying to control the tremor in my voice. “Take me to where the living are.”
He made a U-turn in the middle of the street and raced off in the opposite direction. His silence must have been the result not only of his current speed but also his hope of convincing me with his explanations.
The thread of the story began with two boys, eight and eleven years old, who had left their house to cut wood on Tuesday, July 12, at seven in the morning. They had gone about a hundred meters when they heard the crash of the avalanche of earth and rocks rushing toward them down the side of the hill. They just managed to escape. Their three younger sisters were trapped in the house along with their mother and their newborn baby brother. The only survivors in the family were the two boys who had just gone out, and the father, who had left early for his work as a sand vendor ten kilometers from the house.
The place was an inhospitable wasteland along the highway from Medellín to Rionegro, which at eight in the morning had no inhabitants to become further victims. The radio stations had broadcast the exaggerated news item with so many bloody details and urgent appeals that the first volunteers arrived before the firefighters. At noon two more victimless slides had taken place, which increased the general anxiety, and a local radio station set itself up for direct transmission from the site where the disaster had occurred. At that time almost all the inhabitants of nearby towns and neighborhoods were there, in addition to the curious from all over the city drawn by the appeals on the radio, and the passengers who got off intercity buses more to interfere than to help. In addition to the few bodies from the morning, there were another three hundred in the successive slides. But late in the afternoon, more than two thousand unprepared volunteers were still offering confused assistance to the survivors. By sunset there was almost no room to breathe. The crowd was dense and chaotic at six o’clock, when another devastating avalanche of six hundred thousand cubic meters came down with a colossal din, causing as many victims as if it had happened in Parque Berrío in Medellín. A catastrophe so rapid that Dr. Javier Mora, the city’s secretary of public works, found in the rubble the body of a rabbit that did not have time to escape.
Two weeks later, when I visited the site, only seventy-four corpses had been recovered, and numerous survivors were out of danger. Most were victims not of the slides but of imp
rudence and unruly solidarity. As happens in earthquakes, it was not possible to calculate the number of people with problems who took advantage of the opportunity to disappear without a trace in order to escape their debts or change their wife. But good fortune also had a part to play, because a subsequent investigation showed that after the first day, while recoveries were still being attempted, a mass of rock capable of generating an avalanche of fifty thousand cubic meters had been about to dislodge. More than fifteen days later, with the help of survivors who now were calm, I was able to reconstruct the story, which would not have been possible at the moment it happened because of the awkwardness and unwieldiness of reality.
My job was reduced to rescuing the truth that had been lost in a tangle of contrary suppositions and reconstructing the human drama in the order in which it had occurred, and apart from all political and sentimental calculation. Álvaro Mutis had set me on the right track when he sent me to the publicist Cecilia Warren, who organized the data I brought back from the site of the disaster. The feature article was published in three parts, and it at least had the merit of awakening interest in a forgotten news item two weeks after the event and bringing order to the chaos of the tragedy.
But my best memory of those days is not what I did but what I almost did thanks to the delirious imagination of my old pal from Barranquilla, Orlando Rivera (Figurita), whom I happened to run into on one of my few breaks from the investigation. He had been living in Medellín for the past few months, and was the happy new husband of Sol Santamaría, a charming, free-spirited nun whom he had helped to leave a cloistered convent after seven years of poverty, obedience, and chastity. During one of our memorable drinking bouts, Figurita revealed that he had prepared, with his wife and on his own account, a masterful plan to get Mercedes Barcha out of her boarding school. A priest who was a friend of his, and famous for his arts as a matchmaker, would be ready at any hour to marry us. The only condition, of course, was that Mercedes agree, but we found no way to talk it over with her inside the four walls of her captivity. Today more than ever I feel fierce regret at not having the temerity to live that newspaper-serial drama. Mercedes, for her part, did not learn of the plan until more than fifty years later, when she read about it in the rough draft of this book.
It was one of the last times I saw Figurita. During Carnival in 1960, disguised as a Cuban tiger, he slipped from the float that was taking him back to his house in Baranoa after the final parade and broke his neck on the pavement covered with debris and trash.
On the second night of my work on the landslides in Medellín, two reporters from El Colombiano—so young they were even younger than me—were waiting at the hotel, determined to interview me about the stories of mine that had been published up to that time. It was hard for them to persuade me, because I had, and still have, a prejudice that may be unfair against interviews understood as a session of questions and answers in which both parties make an effort to maintain a revelatory conversation. I suffered from this prejudice at the two papers where I had worked, and above all at Crónica, where I tried to infect the contributors with my reluctance. But I granted that first interview for El Colombiano, and its sincerity was suicidal.
Today I have been the victim of countless interviews over the course of fifty years and in half the world, and I still have not convinced myself of the efficacy of the genre, either asking the questions or answering them. An immense majority of the ones I have not been able to avoid on any subject ought to be considered as an important part of my works of fiction, because they are no more than that: fantasies about my life. On the other hand, I consider them invaluable, not for publication but as raw material for feature articles, which I value as the stellar genre of the best profession in the world.
In any case, it was not the time for festivals. The government of General Rojas Pinilla, now in open conflict with the press and a large part of public opinion, had ended the month of September with the decision to divide the remote and forgotten department of El Chocó among its three prosperous neighbors: Antioquia, Caldas, and Valle. Quibdó, the capital, could be reached from Medellín only on a one-lane road in such bad condition that more than twenty hours were needed to travel one hundred seventy kilometers. The situation is no better today.
In the newsroom of the paper we regarded it as certain that there was not much we could do to stop the dismemberment decreed by a government on bad terms with the Liberal press. Primo Guerrero, El Espectador’s veteran correspondent in Quibdó, reported on the third day that a popular demonstration of entire families, including the children, had occupied the main square, determined to stay there day and night until the government abandoned its plan. The first photographs of the rebellious mothers holding their children in their arms were languishing as the days passed because of the ravages of the vigil on a population living outdoors. Every day we reinforced these reports in the newsroom with editorials or statements by Chocoan politicians and intellectuals residing in Bogotá, but the government seemed resolved to win through indifference. After several days, however, José Salgar approached my desk with his puppeteer’s pencil and suggested that I go to investigate what was really happening in El Chocó. I tried to resist with the small authority I had gained with my report on Medellín, but it was not enough. Guillermo Cano, who was writing with his back to us, shouted without turning around:
“Go on, Gabo, the women in El Chocó are better than the ones you wanted to see in Haiti!”
And so I left without even asking myself how you could write an article on a protest demonstration that rejected violence. I was accompanied by the photographer Guillermo Sánchez, who for months had been pestering me about our doing war stories together. Tired of hearing him, I had shouted at him:
“What war, damn it!”
“Don’t be a damn fool, Gabo,” he delivered the truth with a single stroke, “I always hear you saying that this country has been at war since Independence.”
At dawn on Tuesday, September 21, he appeared in the newsroom ready to cover a muzzled war, dressed more like a guerrilla fighter than a photojournalist, with cameras and bags hanging all over his body. The first surprise before you even left Bogotá was that you went to El Chocó from a secondary airport without services of any kind, surrounded by the wreckage of dead trucks and rusted airplanes. Ours, still alive through the arts of magic, was one of the legendary Catalinas from the Second World War operated as a cargo plane by a civilian company. It had no seats. The interior was unadorned and gloomy, with small clouded windows and a cargo of bales of fibers for making brooms. We were the only passengers. The copilot in shirtsleeves, young and good-looking like the aviators in movies, told us to sit on the bales because they seemed more comfortable. He did not recognize me, but I knew he had been a notable baseball player in the La Matuna leagues in Cartagena.
The takeoff was terrifying, even for a passenger as experienced as Guillermo Sánchez, because of the thundering roar of the engines and the scrap-metal clanging of the fuselage, but once stabilized in the translucent sky of the savanna, the plane glided along with the courage of a war veteran. But past Medellín we were surprised by a diluvian rainstorm over a tangled forest between two cordilleras, and we had to fly right into it. Then we experienced something that perhaps very few mortals have experienced: it rained into the airplane through the leaks in the fuselage. Our friend the copilot, leaping over bales of brooms, brought us the day’s papers to use as umbrellas. I covered even my face with mine, not so much to protect myself from the rain as to keep the others from seeing me weep with terror.
After two hours of luck and chance, the plane leaned to its left, descended in attack position over a dense forest, and gave two exploratory turns above the main square of Quibdó. Guillermo Sánchez, prepared to capture from the air the protest exhausted by its erosive vigils, found nothing but the empty square. The dilapidated amphibian gave one last turn to confirm that there were no obstacles living or dead in the peaceful Atrato River, and com
pleted its felicitous landing on water in the suffocating heat of midday.
The church patched with boards, the cement benches plastered by birds, and an ownerless mule crunching on the branches of a gigantic tree were the only signs of human existence in the dusty, solitary square that looked like nothing so much as an African capital. Our original intention had been to take urgent photographs of the crowd standing in protest and send them to Bogotá on the return plane, while we obtained enough firsthand information for tomorrow’s edition, which we could send by telegraph. None of that was possible, because nothing had happened.
There were no witnesses as we walked the very long street parallel to the river, lined with shops that were closed for lunch and residences with wooden balconies and rusted roofs. It was the perfect stage but there was no play. Our good colleague Primo Guerrero, correspondent for El Espectador, was taking a siesta without a care in the world in a springlike hammock under the arbor in his house, as if the silence that surrounded him was the peace of the grave. The frankness with which he explained his indolence could not have been more objective. After the demonstrations of the first few days, the tension had eased for lack of topics. Then a mobilization of the entire town was organized with theatrical techniques, some pictures were taken that were not published because they were not very credible, and patriotic speeches were given that in fact had shaken the country, but the government remained imperturbable. Primo Guerrero, with an ethical flexibility that perhaps even God has forgiven him for, kept the protest alive in the press by dint of telegrams.
Our professional problem was simple: we had not undertaken that Tarzanic expedition in order to report that the news did not exist. On the other hand, we had access to the means to make it true and achieve its purpose. Primo Guerrero proposed organizing the portable demonstration one more time, and nobody could think of a better idea. Our most enthusiastic collaborator was Captain Luis A. Cano, the new governor appointed after the angry resignation of the previous one, and he had the fortitude to delay the plane so that the paper would receive Guillermo Sánchez’s red-hot photographs in time. That was how the news item invented by necessity became the only one that was true, magnified by the press and radio throughout the country and caught on the fly by the military government in order to save face. That same night a general mobilization of Chocoan politicians began—some of them very influential in certain sectors of the country—and two days later General Rojas Pinilla declared the cancellation of his own decision to distribute pieces of El Chocó to its neighbors.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 50
