Living to Tell the Tale (13 page)

During this time my grandfather hung in the dining room the picture of the Liberator Simón Bolívar at his funeral. It was difficult for me to understand why he did not have the corpse’s shroud I had seen at
wakes, but lay stretched out on a desk wearing the uniform of his days of glory. My grandfather cleared up my doubts with a categorical statement:

“He was different.”

Then, in a tremulous voice that did not seem to be his, he read me a long poem that hung next to the picture, of which I remembered only and forever the final verses: “Thou, Santa Marta, wert charitable, and in thy lap thou gavest
him that piece of the ocean’s strand to die.” From then on, and for many years afterward, I had the idea that Bolívar had been found
dead on the beach. It was my grandfather who taught me and asked me never to forget that he was the greatest man ever born in the history of the world. Confused by the discrepancy between his statement and another that my grandmother had made to me with equal emphasis,
I asked my grandfather if Bolívar was greater than Jesus Christ. He replied, shaking his head without his earlier conviction:

“One thing has nothing to do with the other.”

I know now that it had been my grandmother who insisted that her husband take me with him on his twilight excursions, for she was certain they were pretexts for visiting his real or hypothetical lovers. It is probable that
at times I served as his alibi, but the truth is that he never took me anywhere that was not on the anticipated itinerary. I have a clear image, however, of a night when I was holding somebody’s hand and happened to pass a strange house and saw my grandfather sitting like the lord and master in the living room. I never could understand why I was shaken by the intuition that I should not tell this
to anyone. Until the sun rose today.

It was also my grandfather who gave me my first contact with the written word when I was five, and he took me one afternoon to see the animals in a circus passing through Cataca, under a tent as large as a church. The one that attracted my attention was a battered, desolate ruminant with the expression of a frightening mother.

“It’s a camel,” my grandfather
told me.

Someone standing nearby interrupted:

“Excuse me, Colonel, but it’s a dromedary.”

I can imagine now how my grandfather must have felt when someone corrected him in the presence of his grandson. Without even thinking about it, he went him one better with a worthy question:

“What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know,” the other man said, “but this is a dromedary.”

My grandfather was not
an educated man and did not pretend to be one, for he had dropped out of the public school in Riohacha to go and shoot a gun in one of the countless civil wars along the Caribbean. He never studied again, but all his
life he was conscious of the gaps, and he had an avid desire for immediate knowledge that more than compensated for his deficiencies. That afternoon he returned dejected to his office
and consulted the dictionary with childish attention. Then he and I learned for the rest of our lives the difference between a dromedary and a camel. In the end he placed the glorious tome in my lap and said:

“This book not only knows everything, but it’s also the only one that’s never wrong.”

It was a huge illustrated book, on its spine a colossal Atlas holding the vault of the universe on
his shoulders. I did not know how to read or write, but I could imagine how correct the colonel was if the book had almost two thousand large, crowded pages with beautiful drawings. In church I had been surprised by the size of the missal, but the dictionary was thicker. It was like looking out at the entire world for the first time.

“How many words does it have?” I asked.

“All of them,” said
my grandfather.

The truth is that I did not need the written word at this time because I expressed everything that made an impression on me in drawings. At the age of four I had drawn a magician who cut off his wife’s head and put it back on again, just as Richardine had done in his act at the Olympia. The graphic sequence began with the decapitation by handsaw, continued with the triumphant
display of the bleeding head, and ended with the wife, her head restored, thanking the audience for its applause. Comic strips had already been invented but I only saw them later in the color supplement to the Sunday papers. Then I began to invent graphic stories without dialogue. But when my grandfather gave me the dictionary, it roused so much curiosity in me about words that I read it as if it
were a novel, in alphabetical order, with little understanding. That was my first contact with what would be the fundamental book in my destiny as a writer.

When children are told the first story that in reality appeals to them, it is very difficult to get them to listen to another. I believe this is not true for children who are storytellers, and it was not true for me. I wanted more. The voracity
with which I
listened to stories always left me hoping for a better one the next day, above all those that had to do with the mysteries of sacred history.

Everything that happened to me in the street had an enormous resonance in the house. The women in the kitchen would tell the stories to the strangers arriving on the train, who in turn brought other stories to be told, and all of it was incorporated
into the torrent of oral tradition. Some events were first learned through the accordion players who sang about them at fairs, and travelers would retell them and enhance them. But the most striking story of my childhood occurred very early one Sunday, on our way to Mass, in an ill-advised sentence spoken by my grandmother:

“Poor Nicolasito is going to miss Pentecost Mass.”

I was happy, because
Sunday Mass was too long for a boy my age, and the sermons of Father Angarita, whom I loved so much as a child, seemed soporific. But it was a vain illusion, for my grandfather almost dragged me to the Belgian’s studio, in the green velveteen suit I had been dressed in for Mass and that was too tight for me in the crotch. The police officers recognized my grandfather from a distance and opened
the door for him with the ritual formula:

“Go in, Colonel.”

Only then did I learn that the Belgian had inhaled a solution of gold cyanide—which he shared with his dog—after seeing
All Quiet on the Western Front,
the picture by Lewis Milestone based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Popular intuition, which always finds the truth even when it seems impossible, understood and proclaimed that
the Belgian had not been able to endure the shock of seeing himself crushed with his decimated patrol in a morass of mud in Normandy.

The small reception room was in darkness because of the closed windows, but the early light from the courtyard illuminated the bedroom, where the mayor and two more police officers were waiting for my grandfather. There was the body covered with a blanket on a
campaign cot, the crutches within reach, where their owner had left them before he lay down to die. Beside him, on a wooden stool, was the tray where he had
vaporized the cyanide, and a sheet of paper with large letters written in pencil: “Don’t blame anyone, I’m killing myself because I’m a fool.” The legal formalities and the details of the funeral, soon resolved by my grandfather, did not take
more than ten minutes. For me, however, they were the most affecting ten minutes I would remember in my life.

The first thing that shook me when I came in was the smell in the bedroom. I learned only much later that it was the bitter almond smell of the cyanide that the Belgian had inhaled in order to die. But not that or any other impression would be more intense and long-lasting than the sight
of the corpse when the mayor moved the blanket aside to show him to my grandfather. He was naked, stiff and twisted, his rough skin covered with yellow hair, his eyes like still pools looking at us as if they were alive. That horror of being seen by the dead shook me for years afterward whenever I passed the graves without crosses of suicides buried outside the cemetery by order of the Church.
But what I remembered with greatest clarity, along with a charge of horror when I saw the body, was the boredom of nights in his house. Perhaps that was why I said to my grandfather when we left the house:

“The Belgian won’t be playing chess anymore.”

It was a simple idea, but my grandfather told it to the family as if it were a brilliant witticism. The women repeated it with so much enthusiasm
that for some time I ran from visitors for fear they would say it in front of me or oblige me to repeat it. This also revealed to me a characteristic of adults that would be very useful to me as a writer: each of them told the story with new details that they added on their own, until the various versions became different from the original. No one can imagine the compassion I have felt since then
for the poor children whose parents have declared them geniuses, who make them sing for visitors, imitate birds, even lie in order to entertain. Today I realize, however, that this simple sentence was my first literary success.

That was my life in 1932, when it was announced that Peruvian troops, under the military regime of General Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro, had taken the undefended town of
Leticia, on
the banks of the Amazon River in the extreme south of Colombia. The news resounded throughout the country. The government ordered national mobilization and a public drive that would go from house to house and collect the most valuable family jewels. Patriotism exacerbated by the duplicitous attack of the Peruvian troops provoked an unprecedented popular response. The collectors could
not cope with the number of voluntary contributions from all the houses, above all the wedding rings, as esteemed for their real price as for their symbolic value.

For me, on the other hand, it was one of the happiest times because of its disorder. The sterile rigor of schools was broken and replaced by popular creativity on the streets and in the houses. A civic battalion was formed from the
cream of the young boys without distinctions of class or color, the feminine brigades of the Red Cross were created, anthems of war to the death against the evil aggressor were improvised, and a unanimous shout resounded throughout the country: “Long live Colombia, down with Peru!”

I never knew how these epic achievements ended because after a certain period of time spirits calmed without sufficient
explanations. Peace was achieved with the assassination of General Sánchez Cerro at the hands of someone opposed to his bloody rule, and the war cry became routine when celebrating soccer victories at school. But my parents, who had contributed their wedding rings for the war, never recovered from their naïveté.

As far as I can remember, my vocation for music was revealed in those years by the
fascination I felt for the accordion players with their travelers’ songs. I knew some of them by heart, like the ones the women in the kitchen sang in secret because my grandmother considered them vulgar. Still, my need to sing in order to feel alive was inspired by the tangos of Carlos Gardel that infected half the world. I would dress like him, with a felt hat and silk scarf, and I did not need
too many requests to burst into a tango at the top of my voice. Until the ill-fated morning when Aunt Mama woke me with the news that Gardel had died in the collision of two planes in Medellín. Months earlier I had sung “Cuesta abajo” at a charitable evening, accompanied by the Echeverri sisters, pure Bogotáns who were the teachers of
teachers and the soul of every charitable evening and patriotic
commemoration celebrated in Cataca. And I sang with so much character that my mother did not dare contradict me when I told her I wanted to learn the piano instead of the accordion that had been repudiated by my grandmother.

That same night she took me to the Señoritas Echeverri for lessons. While they were talking I looked at the piano from the other side of the room with the devotion of a stray
dog, estimated if my feet could reach the pedals, and wondered if my thumb and little finger would be able to stretch for extraordinary intervals, or if I would be capable of deciphering the hieroglyphics of the staff. It was a visit of beautiful hopes that lasted for two hours. But in vain, for in the end the teachers told us that the piano was out of service and they did not know for how long.
The idea was postponed until the return of the annual tuner, but it was not mentioned again until half a lifetime later, when in a casual conversation I reminded my mother of the sorrow I had felt at not learning the piano. She sighed.

“And the worst thing,” she said, “is that there was nothing wrong with it.”

Then I learned that she had arranged the excuse of the damaged piano with the teachers
to spare me the torture she had suffered during five years of imbecilic exercises at the Colegio de la Presentación. The consolation was that during this time the Montessori school had opened in Cataca, and its teachers stimulated the five senses by means of practical exercises, and taught singing. With the talent and beauty of the director, Rosa Elena Fergusson, studying was something as marvelous
as the joy of being alive. I learned to appreciate my sense of smell, whose power of nostalgic evocation is overwhelming. And taste, which I refined to the point where I have had drinks that taste of window, old bread that tastes of trunk, infusions that taste of Mass. In theory it is difficult to comprehend subjective pleasures, but those who have experienced them will understand right away.

I do not believe there is a method better than the Montessorian for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world
and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life. It has been rebuked for encouraging a sense of independence and individualism, and perhaps in my case this was true, but on the other hand I never learned to divide or find a square root or handle abstract ideas.
We were so young that I remember only two classmates. One was Juanita Mendoza, who died of typhus at the age of seven, soon after the school opened, and this made so strong an impression on me that I have never been able to forget her wearing a crown and bridal veil in her coffin. The other is Guillermo Valencia Abdala, my friend since our first recess, and my infallible physician for Monday hangovers.