Living to Tell the Tale (16 page)

This was how Barranquilla was, a city that resembled no other, above all from December to March, when the northern trade winds
compensated for infernal days with nocturnal gales that whirled around the courtyards of houses and carried chickens through the air. Only the transient hotels and the sailors’ taverns around the port remained alive. Some little nocturnal birds would wait whole nights for an always uncertain clientele from the riverboats. A brass band would play a languid waltz on the alameda but no one heard
it because of the shouts of the drivers arguing about soccer among the taxis parked facing into the sidewalk along the Paseo Bolívar. The only possible place was the Café Roma, which was frequented by Spanish refugees and never closed for the simple reason that it had no doors. It also had no roof, in a city of sacramental rainstorms, but you never heard of anyone who stopped eating a potato omelet
or closing a deal on account of the rain. It was a retreat from the weather, with little round tables painted white and iron chairs under the foliage of flowering acacias. At eleven, when the morning papers—
El Heraldo
and
La Prensa
—went to press, the night editors would meet there to eat. The Spanish refugees were there from seven on, after listening at home to the spoken newspaper of Professor
Juan José Pérez Domenech, who continued to report on the Spanish Civil War twelve years after it had been lost. One fateful night, the writer Eduardo Zalamea anchored there on his way back from La Guajira, and he shot himself in the chest with a revolver without serious consequences. The table became a historic relic that the waiters showed to tourists, who were not permitted to sit at it. Years
later, Zalamea published the testimony of his adventure in
Cuatro años a bordo de mí mismo—Four Years Aboard Myself—
a novel that opened unsuspected horizons for our generation.

I was the most destitute of the brotherhood, and often I took refuge in the Café Roma to write until dawn in an isolated corner, for my two jobs together had the paradoxical virtue of
being important and ill-paid. Dawn
found me there, reading without mercy, and when hunger pursued me I would have thick hot chocolate and a sandwich of good Spanish ham, and stroll with the first light of dawn beneath the flowering
matarratón
trees on the Paseo Bolívar. During the first weeks I wrote until very late in the newsroom, and slept a few hours in the empty offices or on the rolls of newsprint, but in time I found myself
obliged to look for a less original place.

The solution, like so many others in the future, was given to me by the good-natured cabdrivers along the Paseo Bolívar: a transient hotel a block from the cathedral, where you could sleep alone or with a companion for a peso and a half. The building was very old but well maintained, at the expense of the solemn little whores who plundered the Paseo
Bolívar after six in the evening, lying in wait for loves gone astray. The concierge was named Lácides. He had a crossed glass eye, and he stammered because of shyness, and I still remember him with an immense gratitude that began the first night I went there. He tossed the peso and fifty centavos into the drawer behind the counter, already filled with the loose, wrinkled bills of early evening, and
he gave me the key to room number six.

I had never been in so peaceful a place. The most I heard were muffled steps, an incomprehensible murmur, and every once in a while the anguished creak of rusted springs. But not a whisper, not a sigh: nothing. The only difficulty was the ovenlike heat because the window was sealed shut with wooden crosspieces. Still, on the first night I read William Irish
very well, almost until dawn.

It had been the mansion of former shipowners, with columns overlaid in alabaster and gaudy friezes around an interior courtyard covered by pagan stained glass that radiated the splendor of a greenhouse. The city’s notary offices were on the ground floor. On each of the three stories of the original house there were six large marble chambers, converted into cardboard
cubicles—just like mine—where the nightwalkers of the area reaped their harvest. That joyful bawdy house once had the name Hotel New York, and Alfonso Fuenmayor later called it the Skyscraper, in memory of the suicides who in those
years were throwing themselves off the top of the Empire State Building.

In any case, the axis of our lives was the Librería Mundo at twelve noon and at six in the
evening, on the busiest block of Calle San Blas. Germán Vargas, an intimate friend of the owner, Don Jorge Rondón, was the one who convinced him to open the store that soon became the meeting place for young journalists, writers, and politicians. Rondón lacked business experience, but he soon learned, and with an enthusiasm and a generosity that soon turned him into an unforgettable Maecenas. Germán,
Álvaro, and Alfonso were his advisors in ordering books, above all the new books from Buenos Aires, where publishers had begun the translation, printing, and mass distribution of new literature from all over the world following the Second World War. Thanks to them we could read in a timely way books that otherwise would not have come to the city. The publishers themselves encouraged their patrons
and made it possible for Barranquilla to again become the center of reading it had been years earlier, until Don Ramón’s historic bookstore ceased to exist.

It was not too long after my arrival when I joined the brotherhood that waited for the traveling salesmen from the Argentine publishers as if they were envoys from heaven. Thanks to them we were early admirers of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio
Cortázar, Felisberto Hernández, and the English and North American novelists who were well translated by Victoria Ocampo’s crew. Arturo Barea’s
The Making of a Rebel—
was the first hopeful message from a remote Spain silenced by two wars. One of those travelers, the punctual Guillermo Dávalos, had the good habit of sharing our nocturnal binges and giving us as presents the samples of his new books
after he had finished his business in the city.

The group, who lived far from the center of the city, did not go to the Café Roma at night unless they had concrete reasons to do so. For me, on the other hand, it was the house I did not have. In the morning I worked in the peaceful editorial offices of
El Heraldo
, had lunch how, when, and where I could, but almost always as the guest of somebody
in the group of good
friends and interested politicians. In the afternoon I wrote “La Jirafa,” my daily commentary, and any other occasional text. At twelve noon and six in the evening I was the most punctual at the Librería Mundo. The aperitif at lunch, which the group drank for years at the Café Colombia, later moved to the Café Japy, across the street, because it was the busiest and most spirited
one on Calle San Blas. We used it to see visitors, as an office and place of business, to conduct interviews, and as an easy place for all of us to meet.

Don Ramón’s table at the Japy had inviolable laws imposed by custom. He was the first to arrive because of his schedule of teaching until four in the afternoon. No more than six of us fit at the table. We had chosen our places in relation to
his, and it was considered bad taste to squeeze in other chairs where they did not fit. Because of the duration and quality of their friendship, from the first day Germán sat on his right. He took care of Don Ramón’s material affairs. He resolved them even if he was not asked to, because the scholar had an innate vocation for not understanding practical life. In those days, the principal concern
was the sale of his books to the departmental library and wrapping up other matters before he traveled to Barcelona. More than a secretary, Germán seemed like a good son.

Don Ramón’s relations with Alfonso, on the other hand, were based on more difficult literary and political problems. As for Álvaro, it always seemed to me that he was inhibited when he found Don Ramón alone at the table and
needed the presence of others to begin navigating. The only human being who had an absolute right to a place at the table was José Félix. At night, Don Ramón did not go to the Japy but to the nearby Café Roma, with his friends the Spanish exiles.

I was the last to join his table, and from the first day I sat, with no right of my own to it, in Álvaro Cepeda’s chair while he was in New York. Don
Ramón received me like one more disciple because he had read my stories in
El Espectador.
But I never would have imagined that I would become close enough to him to ask to borrow money for my trip to Aracataca with my mother. A short while later, in an inconceivable coincidence, we had our first and only conversation in private when I went
to the Japy before the others in order to pay him, without
witnesses, the six pesos he had lent me.

“Cheers, Genius,” he greeted me as usual. But something in my face alarmed him: “Are you sick?”

“I don’t believe so, Señor,” I said with some uneasiness. “Why?”

“You look all in,” he said, “but don’t pay attention to me; these days we’re all
fotuts del cul
.”

He put the six pesos into his wallet with a reluctant gesture, as if the money were ill-gotten
gains.

“I accept this,” he explained, blushing, “as a memento of a very poor young man who was capable of paying a debt without being asked.”

I did not know what to say, submerged in silence like a leaden well that I endured in the chatter of the room. I never dreamed how fortunate that meeting was. I had the impression that when the group talked, each one brought his grain of sand to the disorder,
and the virtues and defects of each person were confused with those of the others, but it never occurred to me that I could talk alone about art and glory with a man who had lived for years in an encyclopedia. Often, late at night, when I was reading in the solitude of my room, I imagined exciting conversations I would have liked to have with him about my literary doubts, but they melted away
without a trace in the light of the sun. My shyness grew even worse when Alfonso erupted with one of his extraordinary ideas, or Germán condemned one of the maestro’s hurried opinions, or Álvaro shouted out a project that drove us out of our minds.

To my good fortune, that day in the Japy it was Don Ramón who took the initiative and asked me how my reading was going. At the time I had read everything
I could find by the Lost Generation, in Spanish, with special attention to Faulkner, whom I probed into with the bloodthirsty stealth of a straight razor because of my strange fear that in the long run he might be nothing more than an astute rhetorician. After saying this I was shaken by the apprehension that it would seem a provocation, and I tried to soften it, but Don Ramón did not give
me time.

“Don’t worry, Gabito,” he answered in an impassive way. “If Faulkner were in Barranquilla he would be at this table.”

On the other hand, he found it noteworthy that Ramón Gómez de la Serna interested me so much that I quoted him in “La Jirafa” together with others who were indisputable novelists. I explained that I did not do it because of his novels, since except for
The Chalet of
the Roses
, which I had liked very much, what interested me about him were the audacity of his mind and his verbal talents, but only as a kind of rhythmic gymnastics for learning to write. In that sense, I do not recall a more intelligent genre than his famous
greguerías
, his vivid metaphoric images in prose. Don Ramón interrupted me with his mordant smile:

“The danger for you is that without
realizing it you can also learn to write badly.”

However, before changing the subject he admitted that in the midst of his phosphorescent disorder, Gómez de la Serna was a good poet. His replies were like that, immediate and learned, and I was so blinded by fear that someone would interrupt this unique occasion that my nerves almost did not allow me to assimilate them. But he knew how to manage
the situation. His usual waiter brought him his eleven-thirty Coca-Cola, and he seemed to be unaware of it yet sipped at it through a paper straw without interrupting his explanations. Most of the patrons greeted him in a loud voice from the door: “How are you, Don Ramón?” And he would respond, not looking at them, with a wave of his artist’s hand.

As he spoke, Don Ramón directed furtive glances
at the leather briefcase I clutched at with both hands as I listened to him. When he finished drinking the first Coca-Cola, he twisted the straw as if it were a screwdriver and ordered the second. I asked for mine knowing very well that at this table each man paid his own bill. At last he asked about the mysterious briefcase to which I clung as if it were a life raft.

I told him the truth: it
was the rough draft of the first chapter of the novel I had begun when I returned from Cataca with my mother. With an audacity I would never be capable of again at any crossroads in life or death, I placed the open briefcase on
the table in front of him as an innocent inducement. He stared at me with his clear eyes of a dangerous blue and asked with some astonishment:

“May I?”

It was typed with
countless corrections, on strips of newsprint folded like the bellows of an accordion. Without haste he put on his reading glasses, unfolded the strips of paper with professional skill, and arranged them on the table. He read without a variation in expression, without his skin changing color, without an alteration in his breathing, his cockatoo’s tuft of hair unmoved by the rhythm of his thoughts.
When he finished two complete strips he refolded them in silence, with medieval art, and closed the briefcase. Then he put his glasses in their case and placed it in his breast pocket.

“It is evident that the material is still raw, which is logical,” he said with great simplicity. “But it’s going well.”

He made some marginal comments on my handling of time, which was my life-or-death problem
and without a doubt the most difficult, and he added:

“You must be aware that the drama has already occurred and the characters are there only to evoke it, and so you have to contend with two different times.”

After a series of precise technical comments that I could not appreciate because of my inexperience, he advised me not to call the city in the novel Barranquilla, as I had done in the
rough draft, because it was a name so restricted by reality that it would leave the reader with very little room for dreaming. And he concluded in his mocking tone: