Another issue kept under the table was the kind of life raft available to the men who fell into the sea, of whom only Velasco survived. It is supposed that there must have been two kinds of regulation rafts on board that fell in with them. They were made of cork and canvas, three meters long by one and a half meters wide, with a safety platform in the center, and supplied with provisions, potable water, oars, a first-aid kit, equipment for fishing and navigation, and a Bible. Under those conditions, ten people could survive on board for eight days even without the fishing equipment. But the Caldas had also taken on a load of smaller rafts with no supplies of any kind. According to Velasco’s account, it seems that his was one of the rafts that had no gear. The question that will remain afloat forever is how many other shipwrecked sailors managed to board other rafts that did not take them anywhere.
These had been, beyond any doubt, the most important reasons that delayed official explanations of the shipwreck. Until it occurred to them that their claim was unsustainable because by now the rest of the crew was at home, telling the whole story everywhere in the country. The government insisted to the very end on its version of the storm, and made it official in the categorical statements of a formal communiqué. Censorship did not go to the extreme of prohibiting publication of the remaining installments. Velasco, for his part, did his best to maintain a loyal ambiguity, and it was never learned that he had been pressured not to reveal certain truths, and he did not ask us to reveal them or prevent us from doing so.
After the fifth installment there had been a plan to issue an offprint of the first four installments to meet the demand of readers who wanted to collect the complete story. Don Gabriel Cano, whom we had not seen in the newsroom during those frenetic days, came down from his dovecot and went straight to my desk.
“Tell me something, my young namesake,” he asked, “how many installments is the shipwrecked sailor going to have?”
We were in the account of the seventh day, when Velasco had devoured a business card as the only edible thing in his possession, and he could not tear his shoes apart with his teeth in order to have something to chew on. That meant we still had another seven installments. Don Gabriel was horrified.
“No, my young namesake, no,” he responded with annoyance. “There have to be at least fifty.”
I gave him my arguments, but his were based on the fact that the paper’s circulation was about to double. According to his calculations, it could rise to a figure without precedent in the national press. An editorial committee was improvised, the economic, technical, and journalistic details were studied, and it was agreed that a reasonable limit would be twenty installments. That is to say: six more than the number planned.
Although my name did not appear on the printed installments, my method of working had leaked out, and one night when I went to fulfill my obligations as film critic, an animated discussion about the story of the shipwrecked sailor began in the lobby of the theater. The majority of the people there were friends with whom I exchanged ideas in nearby cafés after the movie. Their opinions helped me to clarify mine for my weekly review. As for the shipwrecked sailor, the general desire—with very few exceptions—was that the story go on for as long as possible.
One of those exceptions was a mature, elegant man wearing a beautiful camel’s hair coat and a melon-shaped hat, who followed me for some three blocks after I left the theater and was returning alone to the paper. He was accompanied by a very beautiful woman, as well dressed as he, and another man who was less impeccable. He removed his hat to greet me and introduced himself with a name I did not retain. Without further preamble he told me he could not agree with the report on the shipwrecked sailor because it played straight into the hands of the Communists. I explained without too much exaggeration that I was no more than the transcriber of the story told by the protagonist himself. But he had his own ideas and thought Velasco had infiltrated the Armed Forces in the service of the Soviet Union. Then I sensed that I was talking to a high-ranking officer in the army or navy, and I was enthusiastic at the idea of a clarification. But it seemed that was all he wanted to tell me.
“I don’t know if you are aware of what you are doing,” he said, “but in any case you are doing a disservice to the country on behalf of the Communists.”
His dazzling wife gestured in alarm and tried to move him away by the arm with a plea in a very low voice: “Please, Rogelio!” He concluded his comment with the same composure he had shown at the beginning:
“Please believe me, I permit myself to say this to you only because of the admiration I feel for what you write.”
He shook my hand again and allowed himself to be led away by his distressed wife. His male companion was surprised and did not manage to say goodbye.
It was the first in a series of incidents that set us thinking in all seriousness about the risks in the street. A few days earlier, in a poor tavern behind the newspaper that served workers in the district until dawn, two unknown men had attempted an unprovoked attack on Gonzalo González, who was drinking his last coffee of the night. No one could understand what motives they might have had against the most peaceable man in the world, except that they had confused him with me because of our Caribbean manners and customs, and the two g’s in his pseudonym: Gog. In any event, security at the paper warned me not to go out alone at night in a city growing more and more dangerous. For me, however, it was so reliable that I would walk to my apartment when I finished work.
One dawn, during those intense days, I felt my hour had come in a hailstorm of glass, when somebody on the street threw a brick through my bedroom window. It was Alejandro Obregón, who had lost his keys and had not found friends who were awake, or a room in any hotel. Tired of looking for a place to sleep, and of ringing the broken bell, he solved the night’s problem with a brick from a nearby construction site. He almost did not greet me when I opened the door so as not to wake me altogether, and he stretched out faceup and slept on the bare floor until noon.
The crowd eager to buy the paper at the door of El Espectador, before it reached the street, grew bigger every day. People who worked in the business center would wait to buy it and read the installment on the bus. I think the interest of readers began for humanitarian reasons, continued for literary reasons and in the end for political considerations, but it was always sustained by the internal tension of the account. Velasco told me episodes that I suspected were invented by him, and he found symbolic or emotional meanings in them, for example the one about the first seagull that did not want to fly away. The story of the airplanes, as recounted by him, had a cinematic beauty. A friend of mine who was a seaman asked me how it was that I knew the sea so well, and I replied that I had only copied down Velasco’s observations with absolute fidelity. After a certain point I no longer had anything to add.
The high command of the navy did not agree. A short while before the end of the series they sent the paper a letter of protest because it had judged, with a Mediterranean criterion and in an inelegant form, a tragedy that could occur wherever naval units operated. “In spite of the mourning and grief that have overwhelmed seven respectable Colombian homes and every man in the fleet,”—the letter said—“reporters who were neophytes in this area did not hesitate to write a series overrun with nontechnical and illogical words and concepts, placed in the mouth of the fortunate and praiseworthy sailor who valiantly saved his life.” For this reason, the fleet requested the intervention of the Office of Information and the Press of the presidency so that it would approve—with the assistance of a naval officer—publications about the incident in the future. It was fortunate that when the letter arrived we were at the next-to-the-last installment and could pretend ignorance until the following week.
Anticipating the final publication of the complete text, we had asked the shipwrecked sailor to help us with the names and addresses of shipmates who had cameras, and they sent us a collection of photographs taken during the voyage. There were pictures of ever
ything, but most were of groups of men on the deck, and in the background you could see the cartons of household appliances—refrigerators, stoves, washing machines—with their prominent brand names. That stroke of luck was enough for us to deny the official denials. The government’s reaction was immediate and categorical, and the supplement’s circulation exceeded all precedents and predictions. But the invincible Guillermo Cano and José Salgar had only one question:
“And now what the hell are we going to do?”
At that moment, dizzy with glory, we had no answer. Every topic seemed banal to us.
Fifteen years after the story had been published in El Espectador, Editorial Tusquets in Barcelona published it in a book with gilt-edge covers that sold as if it were something to eat. Inspired by a sense of justice and by my admiration for the heroic sailor, at the end of the prologue I wrote: “There are books that do not belong to the person who writes them but to the one who suffers them, and this is one of those books. As a consequence, the author’s rights will be for the man who deserves them: our anonymous compatriot who had to endure ten days on a raft without food or water so that this book would be possible.”
It was not an idle remark, for the book’s rights were paid in their entirety to Luis Alejandro Velasco by Tusquets, on my instructions, for fourteen years. Until the lawyer Guillermo Zea Fernández, of Bogotá, persuaded him that the rights belonged to him by law, knowing they were not his but the result of my decision, which had been made in tribute to his heroism, his talent as a narrator, and his friendship.
The suit against me was presented in the Civil Court 22 of the Bogotá Circuit. Then my attorney and friend, Alfonso Gómez Méndez, ordered Editorial Tusquets to suppress the final paragraph of the prologue in future editions and not pay Luis Alejandro Velasco a céntimo more of rights until a legal decision had been reached. This was done. After a long court battle that included documentary, testimonial, and technical evidence, the court decided I was the sole author of the work and did not accede to the petitions submitted by Velasco’s lawyer. And therefore the payments made to him up to that time by my order had not had as their foundation the recognition of the sailor as coauthor but were the result of a voluntary and free decision by the person who wrote the book. From that time on, the author’s rights, also by my order, were donated to an educational foundation.
It was not possible for us to find another story like that, because it was not one of those that are invented on paper. Life invents them, and almost always by dint of blows. We learned this later, when we attempted to write a biography of Ramón Hoyos, the formidable Antioquian cyclist crowned national champion that year for the third time. We launched it to the kind of clamor learned in the series on the sailor, and we stretched it into nineteen installments before realizing that the public preferred Ramón Hoyos riding up mountains and reaching the finish line first, but in real life.
We caught sight of a minimal hope of recovery one afternoon when Salgar phoned and told me to meet him right away in the bar of the Hotel Continental. He was there with an old friend of his, a serious man who had just introduced him to his companion, an absolute albino in laborer’s clothes, with hair and eyebrows so white he seemed dazzling even in the half-light of the bar. Salgar’s friend, a well-known entrepreneur, introduced the man as a mining engineer who was excavating in an empty lot two hundred meters from El Espectador, searching for a legendary treasure that had belonged to General Simón Bolívar. His companion—a very good friend of Salgar’s, and of mine from that time on—guaranteed the truth of the story. It was suspect because of its simplicity: when the Liberator, defeated and dying, was preparing to leave Cartagena and continue his final journey, it is assumed that he chose not to take with him a substantial personal treasure, which he had acquired during the penuries of his wars as a well-deserved reserve for a decent old age. When he was preparing to continue his bitter journey—it is not known whether it was to Caracas or Europe—he had the prudence to leave the treasure hidden in Bogotá, under the protection of a system of Lacedaemonian codes very typical of his time, so that he could find it whenever he needed to, from any part of the world. I recalled these reports with irresistible longing as I was writing The General in His Labyrinth, where the story of the treasure would have been essential, but I could not obtain enough facts to make it credible, and as fiction it seemed weak. That legendary fortune, never recovered by its owner, was what the seeker was seeking with so much eagerness. I did not understand why they had revealed this to us until Salgar explained that his friend, impressed by the story of the shipwrecked sailor, wanted to give us background to this story so that we would follow it until it could be published with comparable publicity.
We went to the site. It was the only empty lot to the west of the Parque de los Periodistas and very close to my new apartment. The friend explained with a colonial map the coordinates of the treasure in the real details of the hills of Monserrate and La Guadalupe. The story was fascinating, and the prize would be a news item as explosive as that of the shipwrecked sailor, and of greater significance worldwide.
We continued visiting the site with a certain frequency to keep up-to-date, we listened to the engineer for endless hours founded on aguardiente and lemon, and we felt farther and farther away from the miracle, until so much time went by that we did not have even a hope left. The only thing we could suspect afterward was that the tale of the treasure was no more than a screen for exploiting without a permit a deposit of something very valuable right in the center of the capital. Though it was possible that this too was another screen for keeping the Liberator’s treasure safe.
These were not the best times for dreaming. After the story of the shipwrecked sailor, I had been advised to spend some time outside Colombia until the situation eased, because of death threats, real or fictitious, that reached us by various means. It was the first thing I thought of when Luis Gabriel Cano asked me without any preamble what I was doing next Wednesday. Since I had no plans, he told me with his customary stolidity to prepare my papers for traveling as the paper’s special correspondent to the Big Four Conference that would convene the following week in Geneva.
The first thing I did was telephone my mother. The news seemed so huge that she asked if I was referring to some farm called Geneva. “It’s a city in Switzerland,” I told her. Without agitation, with her interminable serenity in assimilating the most unexpected upheavals from children, she asked how long I would be there, and I said I would be back in two weeks at the latest. In reality I was going only for the four days of the conference. But for reasons that had nothing to do with my will, I stayed not for two weeks but almost three years. Then I was the one who needed the lifeboat even if only to eat once a day, but I was very careful not to let the family know. Someone once tried to upset my mother with the lie that her son was living like a prince in Paris after deceiving her with the story that he would be there for only two weeks.
“Gabito isn’t deceiving anyone,” she said with an innocent smile, “but sometimes it happens that even God needs to make weeks that are two years long.”
I never had realized that I was a stateless person, just as much as the millions displaced by violence. I had never voted because I did not have a citizen’s identity card. In Barranquilla I had identified myself with my reporter’s credentials from El Heraldo, where I had given a false date of birth in order to avoid military service, and I had been delinquent for the past two years. In cases of emergency I identified myself with a postal card* that the telegraph operator in Zipaquirá had given to me. A providential friend put me in touch with the manager of a travel agency who agreed to get me on the plane on the appropriate date by means of the payment in advance of two hundred dollars and my signature at the bottom of ten blank pages of stamped paper. This was how I learned by chance that my bank balance was a surprising amount that I had not had time to spend because of my reporter’s zeal. My only expenditure, aside from personal expenses that were no more than tho
se of a poor student, was the monthly dispatching of the lifeboat to the family.
On the eve of the flight, the manager of the travel agency chanted to me the name of each document as he placed them on the desk so that I would not confuse them: identity card, record of military service, notarized receipts from the tax office, and certificates of vaccination against smallpox and yellow fever. In the end he asked me for an additional tip for the skinny boy who had been vaccinated twice in my name, as he had been vaccinated every day for years for clients in a hurry.
I traveled to Geneva in time for the inaugural meeting of Eisenhower, Bulganin, Eden, and Faure, with no languages but Spanish and an allowance for a third-class hotel, but backed up by my bank account. I was expected to return in a few weeks, but I do not know by what strange premonition I gave everything I owned in the apartment to my friends, including a stupendous library on cinema that I had collected in two years with the advice of Álvaro Cepeda and Luis Vicens.
The poet Jorge Gaitán Durán came to say goodbye while I was tearing up old papers, and he had the curiosity to look through the wastebasket in case he found something he could use for his magazine. He rescued three or four sheets ripped in half and skimmed over them as he put them together like a puzzle on the desk. He asked me where they were from and I said it was the “Monologue of Isabel Watching the Rain in Macondo,” deleted from the first draft of Leaf Storm. I told him it was not unpublished, because it had appeared in Crónica and in the Magazine Dominical of El Espectador under the same title, which I had made up for it, and with an authorization I remembered giving in a hurry in an elevator. Gaitán Durán did not care, and he published it in the next issue of his magazine Mito.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 54
