Guillermo Sánchez and I did not return to Bogotá right away because we persuaded the paper to allow us to travel through the interior of El Chocó in order to gain profound knowledge of the reality of that fantastic world. After ten days of silence, when we walked into the newsroom tanned by the sun and dropping with fatigue, José Salgar received us, happy but with his usual firmness of character.
“Do you know,” he asked us with his unconquerable certainty, “how long the news about El Chocó has been over?”
The question confronted me for the first time with the mortal condition of journalism. No one, in fact, had taken interest again in El Chocó once the presidential decision not to dismember it had been published. But José Salgar supported me in the risky undertaking of cooking up what I could out of that dead fish.
What we tried to convey in four long installments was the discovery inside Colombia of another inconceivable country that we had not been aware of. A magical homeland of flowering jungles and eternal downpours, where everything seemed like an unimaginable version of ordinary life. The great difficulty in constructing overland routes was the enormous number of indomitable rivers, but there was no more than one bridge in the entire territory. We found a highway seventy-five kilometers long through the virgin forest, built at enormous cost to connect the towns of Itsmina and Yuto, though it did not pass through either one: an act of retaliation by the builder because of his disputes with the two mayors.
In one of the villages in the interior the postal agent asked us to take six months’ worth of mail to his colleague in Itsmina. A pack of domestic cigarettes cost thirty centavos there, as it did in the rest of the country, but when the small weekly supply plane was late the cigarettes increased in price for each day of delay, until the inhabitants found themselves forced to smoke foreign cigarettes that ended up cheaper than domestic ones. A sack of rice cost fifteen pesos more than at the site of cultivation because it was carried through eighty kilometers of virgin jungle on the backs of mules that clung like cats to the mountainsides. The women in the poorest towns panned for gold and platinum in the rivers while the men fished, and on Saturdays they would sell commercial travelers a dozen fish and four grams of platinum for only three pesos.
All this took place in a society famous for its desire to study. But schools were few and far between, and students had to travel several leagues every day, on foot and by canoe, to get to school and come home again. Some were so crowded that the same school was used Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for boys, and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for girls. Circumstances made them the most democratic in the country, because the child of the laundress who did not have enough to eat attended the same school as the child of the mayor.
Very few Colombians at the time knew that in the very heart of the Chocoan jungle was one of the most modern cities in the country. Its name was Andagoya, located at the juncture of the San Juan and Condoto Rivers, and it had a perfect telephone system, and docks for the boats and launches that belonged to the city of beautiful tree-lined avenues. The small, clean houses, with large fenced-in spaces and picturesque wooden steps at the door, seemed planted on the lawns. In the center was a casino with a cabaret-restaurant and a bar where imported liquors cost less than in the rest of the country. It was a city inhabited by men from all over the world who had forgotten nostalgia and lived there better than in their own lands under the all-embracing authority of the local manager of the Chocó Pacífico. For Andagoya, in real life, was a foreign nation of private property, whose dredgers plundered gold and platinum from prehistoric rivers and carried them away in its own boats that went out into the world under no one’s control through the mouths of the San Juan River.
This was the Chocó that we wanted to reveal to Colombians, but with no result at all, because once the news was over everything fell back into place and it continued to be the most forgotten region in the country. I believe that the reason is evident: Colombia had always been a country with a Caribbean identity that opened to the world by means of the umbilical cord of Panama. Its forced amputation condemned us to be what we are today: a nation with an Andean mentality whose circumstances favor the canal between two oceans belonging not to us but to the United States.
The rhythm of the newsroom every week would have been fatal if not for Friday afternoons, when we freed ourselves from work and congregated in the bar of the Hotel Continental across the street for some relaxation that tended to last until dawn. Eduardo Zalamea baptized those nights with a name of his own invention: “cultural Fridays.” It was my only opportunity to converse with him so I would not miss hearing about the new books in the world, which he kept up with in his capacity as an extraordinary reader. The survivors in those tertulias filled with infinite drinks and unforeseeable conclusions—other than two or three eternal friends of Ulises—were those of us reporters who were not afraid to wring the neck of the swan until daybreak.
It had always surprised me that Zalamea never made any observation regarding my editorials, although many of them were inspired by his. But when the “cultural Fridays” were established, he gave free rein to his ideas on the genre. He confessed that he disagreed with the judgments in many of my pieces and would suggest others to me, not in the tone of superior to disciple but as writer to writer.
Another frequent refuge after functions at the Cinema Club were the midnight gatherings in the apartment of Luis Vicens and his wife, Nancy, a few blocks from El Espectador. He had been a collaborator of Marcel Colin Reval, editor-in-chief of the magazine Cinématographie française in Paris, who had traded his cinematic dreams for the good occupation of bookseller in Colombia on account of the wars in Europe. Nancy behaved as a magical host who could enlarge a dining room that sat four into one for twelve. They had met at a family dinner soon after he arrived in Bogotá in 1937. The only place left at the table was next to Nancy, who was horrified when she saw the last guest come in, with his white hair and the skin of a mountain climber burned by the sun. “What bad luck!” she said to herself. “I’ll have to sit next to this Pole who probably doesn’t even know Spanish.” She was almost correct about the language, because the new arrival spoke Castilian in a raw Catalan crossed with French, and she was from Boyacá, with a short temper and a freewheeling tongue. But they got on so well after their initial greeting that they agreed to live together forever.
Their gatherings were improvised, after the great showings of films, in an apartment crowded with a mixture of all the arts, where there was no room for another painting by the young artists of Colombia, some of whom would become famous in the world. Their guests were selected from the best in arts and letters, and members of the group in Barranquilla would show up from time to time. I was made right at home after the appearance of my first movie review, and when I left the paper before midnight I would walk three blocks and oblige them to stay up all night. Maestra Nancy, who in addition to being a sublime cook was also a pitiless matchmaker, would improvise innocent suppers to connect me with the most attractive and liberated girls in the artistic world, and she never forgave my twenty-eight years when I told her that my true vocation was not to be a writer or a journalist but an invincible bachelor.
Álvaro Mutis, in the intervals he had free between his trips around the world, completed in more lofty style my admission into the cultural community. In his capacity as head of public relations for Esso Colombiana, he organized lunches in the most expensive restaurants with people who in reality were valuable and influential in arts and letters, and he often had guests from other cities in the country. The poet Jorge Gaitán Durán, obsessed with creating a great literary magazine that cost a fortune, solved the problem in part with funds from Álvaro Mutis for the promotion of culture. Álvaro Castaño Castillo and his wife, Gloria Valencia, had been trying for years to found a radio station devoted in its entirety to keeping good music and cultural programs within reach. We all kidded them on account of the unreality of their project, except Álvaro Mutis, who di
d all he could to help them. And so they established the station HJCK, “The world in Bogotá,” with a transmitter of five hundred watts, the minimum at the time. Television did not yet exist in Colombia, but Gloria Valencia invented the metaphysical wonder of broadcasting a fashion show on the radio.
The only repose I permitted myself in those heady times were slow Sunday afternoons in the house of Álvaro Mutis, who taught me to listen to music without prejudices of class. We would lie on the rug listening with our hearts, and with no learned speculations, to the great masters. It was the origin of a passion that had begun in the obscure little room at the Biblioteca Nacional and never forgot us again. Today I have listened to as much music as I have been able to obtain, above all romantic chamber music, which I consider the pinnacle of all arts. In Mexico, while I was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude—between 1965 and 1966—I had only two records, which wore out because they were played so often: the Preludes of Debussy and the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night. Later, in Barcelona, when at last I had almost as many as I had always wanted, alphabetical classification seemed too conventional, and I adopted for my own convenience an instrumental order: the cello, which is my favorite, from Vivaldi to Brahms; the violin, from Corelli to Schoenberg; the clavichord and the piano, from Bach to Bartók. Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.
My limitation was that I could not write to music because I paid more attention to what I was hearing than to what I was writing, and even today I attend very few concerts because I feel that in my seat a somewhat prurient intimacy is established with strangers sitting near me. But with time and the possibilities of having good music at home, I learned to write with a musical background in harmony with what I am writing. Chopin’s nocturnes for quiet episodes, or sextets by Brahms for happy afternoons. On the other hand, for years I did not listen to Mozart after I was assaulted by the perverse idea that Mozart does not exist, because when he is good he is Beethoven and when he is bad he is Haydn.
During the years in which I have evoked these memories, I achieved the miracle, and no kind of music interferes with my writing, though perhaps I am not aware of other virtues, for the greatest surprise was given to me by two very young and diligent Catalan musicians who believed they had discovered surprising affinities between my sixth novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Béla Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3. It is true that I listened to it without respite while I was writing the book, because it created a very special and somewhat unusual state of mind in me, but I never thought it could have influenced me to the point where it would be noticed in my writing. I do not know how the members of the Swedish Academy discovered that weakness when they played it as background to the awarding of my prize. I was grateful in a most profound way for that, of course, but if they had asked me—with all my gratitude and respect for them and for Béla Bartók—I would have preferred one of Francisco el Hombre’s spontaneous romanzas from the fiestas of my childhood.
In those years there was no cultural project, no book to be written or picture to be painted in Colombia, that did not pass first through Mutis’s office. I was witness to his dialogue with a young painter who had everything ready for his obligatory journey to Europe but did not have the money for the trip. Álvaro had not even heard his entire story when he took the magic carpet out of his desk.
“Here’s your passage,” he said.
I was dazzled by the naturalness with which he performed these miracles without the slightest display of power. For this reason I still ask myself if he did not have something to do with the request made to me at a cocktail party by Oscar Delgado, the secretary of the Asociación Colombiana de Escritores y Artistas, that I participate in the national short-story contest that was about to be declared void. He said it in so unpleasant a way that the proposition seemed indecorous, but someone who overheard explained to me that in a country like ours, one could not be a writer without knowing that literary competitions are simple social pantomimes. “Even the Nobel Prize,” he concluded without the slightest malice, and without even thinking about it he put me on my guard for another extraordinary decision that waylaid me twenty-seven years later.
The jury for the short-story competition was composed of Hernando Téllez, Juan Lozano y Lozano, Pedro Gómez Valderrama, and another three writers and critics from the big leagues. And so I made no ethical or economic determinations but spent the night in a final revision of “One Day After Saturday,” the story I had written in Barranquilla in a burst of inspiration in the offices of El Nacional. After it had been lying in a drawer for more than a year, I thought it might stir a good jury. It did, and there was an extraordinary prize of three thousand pesos.
At this same time, and without any relation to the contest, Don Samuel Lisman Baum, the cultural attaché of the embassy of Israel, dropped into my office, for he had just inaugurated a publishing enterprise with a book of poems by Maestro León de Greiff: Fifth Hodgepodge Compendium. The edition was presentable, and I had heard good reports about Lisman Baum. And so I gave him a very much revised copy of Leaf Storm and sent him on his way with the commitment to talk later. Above all about money, which in the end—of course—was the only thing we never talked about. Cecilia Porras painted a new cover—which she was never paid for either—based on my description of the character of the boy. The graphics workshop at El Espectador provided at no charge the plate for the title pages in color.
I knew nothing else until some five months later, when Editorial Sipa of Bogotá—I had never heard of it—called me at the paper to tell me that the edition of four thousand copies was ready for distribution, but they did not know what to do with it because no one had any word from Lisman Baum. Not even the reporters on the newspaper could find any trace of him, and no one has to this day. Ulises suggested that they sell the copies to bookstores on the basis of a press campaign that he himself initiated with a note that I still have not finished thanking him for. The critical reception was excellent, but most of the edition remained in the warehouse, it never was established how many copies were sold, and I did not receive a céntimo of royalties from anyone.
Four years later Eduardo Caballero Calderón, who published the Biblioteca Básica de Cultura Colombiana, included a pocket edition of Leaf Storm in a collection of works that were sold at newsstands in Bogotá and other cities. He paid the contracted rights, meager but on time, which had for me the sentimental value of being the first I had received for a book. The edition had some changes that I did not identify as mine, and I did not concern myself with not including them in subsequent editions. Almost thirteen years later, when I passed through Colombia after the launching of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Buenos Aires, I found on the newsstands in Bogotá numerous remaindered copies of the first edition of Leaf Storm selling for a peso each. I bought all I could carry. Since then I have found in Latin American bookstores other scattered leftovers, which they were trying to sell as historic books. About two years ago an English dealer in old books sold a copy of the first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, signed by me, for three thousand dollars.
None of those incidents distracted me for an instant from the grinding of my journalist’s mill. The initial success of the serialized articles obliged us to find fodder to feed an insatiable beast. The daily tension was untenable, not only in identifying and searching for topics but in the writing, which always was threatened by the charms of fiction. At El Espectador there was no doubt: the invariable raw material of the profession was the truth and nothing but the truth, and that kept us in a state of unendurable tension. José Salgar and I ended up so tormented by this that it did not give us a moment’s peace even on Sundays, our day of rest.
In 1956 it was learned that Pope Pius XII was suffering from an attack of hiccups that could cost him his life. The only antecedent I recall is the masterful story “P. & O.,”
by Somerset Maugham, whose protagonist died in the middle of the Indian Ocean from an attack of hiccups that consumed him in five days, while people from all over the world were sending him every kind of extravagant remedy, but I believe I did not know the story at the time. On weekends we did not dare go too far in our excursions to the towns on the savanna because the paper was prepared to publish a special edition in the event of the pope’s death. I was in favor of having the edition ready, with only a few spaces to fill with the first cables of his death. Two years later, when I was a correspondent in Rome, the resolution of the papal hiccups was still being awaited.
Another irresistible problem at the paper was the tendency to concern ourselves only with spectacular subjects that could bring in more and more readers, and I had the more modest one of not losing sight of another less-well-served public that thought more with its heart. Among the few topics that I managed to find, I have kept the memory of a simple story that caught me on the fly through the window of a bus. At the entrance to a beautiful colonial house at number 567 on Carrera Octava in Bogotá there was a sign that underrated itself: “Office of Unclaimed Letters of the National Mail Service.” I do not remember at all if I ever lost anything by means of those detours, but I got off the bus and knocked at the door. The man who answered was responsible for the office with its six methodical employees, covered by the rust of routine, whose romantic mission it was to find the addressee of any letter gone astray.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 51
