Living to Tell the Tale (17 page)

“Or play the innocent and wait for it to drop from heaven. After all, the Athens of Sophocles was never the same as the city of Antigone.”

But what I followed to the letter forever after was the sentence with which he said goodbye
to me that afternoon:

“I thank you for your courtesy, and I’m going to reciprocate with a piece of advice: never show anybody the rough draft of anything you’re writing.”

It was my only conversation alone with him, but it was worth all of them, because he left for Barcelona on April 15, 1950, as
had been anticipated for more than a year, rarefied in his black woolen suit and magistrate’s hat.
It was like seeing off a schoolboy. At the age of sixty-eight he was in good health and his lucidity was intact, but those of us who accompanied him to the airport said goodbye as if he were someone returning to his native land to attend his own funeral.

Only on the following day, when we came to our table in the Japy, did we realize the void left by his chair, which no one would occupy until
we agreed it should be Germán. We needed a few days to become accustomed to the new rhythm of our daily conversation, until the first letter from Don Ramón arrived, which was like hearing his voice written in a meticulous hand in purple ink. In this way a frequent and intense correspondence with all of us was initiated through Germán, in which he recounted very little of his life and a great deal
about a Spain that he would continue to consider an enemy country as long as Franco lived and maintained Spanish dominion over Cataluña.

The idea for the weekly was Alfonso Fuenmayor’s and had originated long before this time, but I have the impression it was hastened along by the departure of the Catalan scholar. When we were at the Café Roma three nights later, Alfonso informed us that he had
everything ready for the launch. It would be a weekly twenty-page journalistic and literary tabloid whose name—
Crónica
—would not say much to anyone. To us it seemed insane that after four years of not acquiring funds from places that had more than enough money, Alfonso Fuenmayor had obtained backing from artisans, automobile mechanics, retired magistrates, and even complicit tavern owners who
agreed to pay for their advertisements with rum. But there were reasons to think it would be well received in a city that, in the midst of its industrial drive and civic conceits, kept alive its devotion to its poets.

Other than ourselves there would be few regular contributors. The only professional with extensive experience was Carlos Osío Noguera—El Vate Osío, or Osío the Bard—a poet and journalist
with a very personal amiability and an enormous body, who was a government functionary and a censor at
El Nacional
, where he had worked with Álvaro Cepeda and
Germán Vargas. Another would be Roberto (Bob) Prieto, a strange, erudite member of the upper class who could think in English or French as well as he did in Spanish, and play various works by the great masters from memory on the piano. The
least comprehensible person on the list thought up by Alfonso Fuenmayor was Julio Mario Santodomingo. He imposed him without reservation because of Santodomingo’s intention to be a different kind of man, but what few of us understood was why he would appear on the list for the editorial board when he seemed destined to be a Latin Rockefeller, intelligent, educated, cordial, but condemned without
appeal to the fog of power. Very few knew, as we four promoters of the magazine did, that the secret dream of his twenty-five years was to be a writer.

The publisher, by his own right, would be Alfonso. Germán Vargas would be more than anything else the great reporter with whom I hoped to share the position, not when I had time—we never had it—but when I achieved my dream of learning how to do
it. Álvaro Cepeda would send contributions in his free time at Columbia University, in New York. At the end of the line, no one was freer and more eager than I to be named managing editor of an independent and uncertain weekly, and I was.

Alfonso had reserves in his files going back many years, and a good deal of advance work from the last six months, including editorial commentaries, literary
materials, masterful articles, and promises of commercial advertising from his wealthy friends. The managing editor, with no fixed schedule and a salary better than that of any journalist in my category, but dependent on future earnings, was also prepared to put out a magazine that would be worthwhile and on time. At last, on Saturday of the following week, when I walked into our cubicle at
El
Heraldo
at five in the afternoon, Alfonso Fuenmayor did not even look up to finish his editorial.

“Look over all your stuff, Maestro,” he said. “
Crónica
’s coming out next week.”

I was not frightened because I had already heard the same statement twice before. But it happened on the third try.
The biggest journalistic event of the week—by overwhelming odds—had been the arrival of the Brazilian
soccer player Heleno de Freitas to play for Deportivo Junior, yet we would not cover it in competition with the specialized press but treat it as major news of cultural and social interest.
Crónica
would not allow itself to be pigeonholed by those kinds of distinctions, least of all when dealing with something as popular as soccer. The decision was unanimous and the work efficient.

We had prepared
so much material in advance that the only last-minute item was the article about Heleno, written by Germán Vargas, a master of the genre and a soccer fanatic. The first issue was right on time and appeared on the newsstands on Saturday, April 29, 1950, the day of St. Catherine of Siena, the writer of blue letters on the most beautiful square in the world.
Crónica
was printed with a last-minute
slogan of mine under the name: “Su mejor weekend,” “Your Best Weekend.” We knew we were defying the indigestible purism that prevailed in the Colombian press during those years, but what we wanted to say with the slogan had no equivalent with the same nuances in Spanish. The cover was an ink drawing of Heleno de Freitas by Alfonso Melo, the only portrait artist among our three draftsmen.

The
edition, in spite of last-minute rushing and a lack of publicity, was sold out long before the entire editorial staff reached the municipal stadium on the following day—Sunday, April 30—where a stellar match was being played between Deportivo Junior and Sporting, both teams from Barranquilla. The magazine itself was divided because Germán and Álvaro were fans of Sporting, and Alfonso and I supported
Junior. However, the mere name of Heleno and the excellent article by Germán Vargas sustained the mistaken notion that
Crónica
was, at last, the great sports magazine that Colombia had been waiting for.

The stadium was crowded all the way up to the pennants. After six minutes of the first period, Heleno de Freitas scored his first goal in Colombia with a left rebound from the center of the field.
Although in the end Sporting won 3–2, the afternoon belonged to Heleno, and after him, to us, because of the
success of the premonitory cover. Yet there was no power human or divine capable of making any public understand that
Crónica
was not a sports magazine but a cultural weekly that had honored Heleno de Freitas as one of the great news stories of the year.

It was not beginners’ luck. Three
of us were in the habit of dealing with soccer topics in general interest columns, including Germán Vargas, of course. Alfonso Fuenmayor was an avid soccer fan, and for years Álvaro Cepeda had been the Colombia correspondent for
The Sporting News
in St. Louis, Missouri. But the readers we longed for did not welcome the subsequent issues with open arms, and the fans in the stadiums abandoned us
without a pang.

Trying to repair the break, we decided on the editorial board that I would write the main article about Sebastián Berascochea, another of the Uruguayan stars on Deportivo Junior, in the hope I would reconcile soccer and literature as I so often had tried to do with other occult sciences in my daily column. The soccer fever that Luis Carmelo Correa had infected me with in the fields
of Cataca had subsided almost to zero. Besides, I was one of the early fans of Caribbean baseball—or
el juego de pelota
, as we called it in the vernacular. Yet I took up the challenge.

My model, of course, was the reporting of Germán Vargas. I backed this up by reading some other sportswriters, and felt relieved after a long conversation with Berascochea, an intelligent, amiable man with a very
clear sense of the image he wanted to give to his public. The problem was that I identified and described him as an exemplary Basque, only because of his last name, not bothering to consider the detail that he was a very dark-skinned black with the finest African lineage. It was the greatest blunder of my life, at the very worst moment for the magazine. In fact, I identified with all my heart with
the letter from a reader who defined me as a sportswriter incapable of telling a soccer ball from a trolley car. Germán Vargas himself, so meticulous in his judgments, affirmed years later in a commemorative book that the article on Berascochea was the worst thing I had ever written. I believe he exaggerated, but not too
much, because no one knew the profession as well as he did, with his reports
and articles written in so fluid a tone that they seemed to have been dictated to the linotypist.

We did not give up soccer or baseball because both were popular along the Caribbean coast, but we increased the current topics and new works of literature. It was all in vain: we never could overcome the mistaken assumption that
Crónica
was a sports magazine, but the stadium fans overcame theirs
and abandoned us to our fate. And so we continued to publish it as we had intended, although after the third week it was still floating in the limbo of its own ambiguity.

I was not disheartened. The trip to Cataca with my mother, my historic conversation with Don Ramón Vinyes, and my deep connection to the Barranquilla Group had filled me with an encouragement that lasted for the rest of my life.
From then on I did not earn a centavo except with the typewriter, and this seems more meritorious to me than one might think, because the first royalties that allowed me to live on my stories and novels were paid to me when I was in my forties, after I had published four books with the most abject earnings. Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints, and illusions
intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer.

W
HEN THE DISASTER
of Aracataca had been consummated, and my grandfather was dead, and what might have remained of his uncertain powers was extinguished, those of us who had lived by them were at the mercy of nostalgic longings. Not a soul was left in the
house when no one came back on the train. Mina and Francisca Simodosea remained there under the protection of Elvira Carrillo, who took care of them with a servant’s devotion. When, in the end, my grandmother lost her sight and her reason, my parents took her with them so that she would at least have a better life for her dying. Aunt Francisca, virgin and martyr, continued to be the same woman
of uncommon self-assurance and gruff aphorisms, who refused to give up the keys to the cemetery and the preparation of Hosts for consecration, arguing that God would have called her if that was His will. One day she sat down in the doorway of her room with several of her immaculate sheets and sewed her own made-to-measure shroud with such fine workmanship that death waited for more than two weeks
until she had finished it. That night she lay down without saying goodbye to anyone, without any kind of disease or pain, and prepared to die in the best of health. Only later did people learn that on the previous night she had filled out the death certificates and taken care of the formalities for
her own funeral. Elvira Carrillo, who also had never known a man, by her own choice, was left alone
in the immense solitude of the house. At midnight the ghost with the eternal cough in the neighboring bedrooms would wake her, but it never mattered because she was accustomed to also sharing the afflictions of supernatural life.

Her twin brother Esteban Carrillo, on the contrary, remained lucid and dynamic until he was very old. Once when I was having breakfast with him, I recalled with all
its visual details that people on the Ciénaga launch had tried to throw his father overboard, that he had been lifted onto the shoulders of the crowd and tossed in a blanket like Sancho Panza being tossed by the mule drivers. By then Papalelo had died, and I recounted the memory to Uncle Esteban because I thought it was amusing. But he leaped to his feet, furious because I had not told anyone about
it as soon as it happened, and eager for me to identify in my memory the man who had been talking to my grandfather on that occasion, so that he could tell my uncle who the men were who had tried to drown his father. He could not understand either why Papalelo had not defended himself, when he was a good shot who during two civil wars had often been in the line of fire, who slept with a revolver
under his pillow, and who in peaceful times had killed an enemy in a duel. In any case, Esteban told me, it would never be too late for him and his brothers to punish the affront. It was the Guajiran law: an insult to a member of the family had to be paid for by all the males in the aggressor’s family. Uncle Esteban was so determined that he took his revolver from his belt and placed it on the table
so as not to lose time while he finished questioning me. From then on, whenever we met in our wanderings his hope returned that I had remembered. One night he appeared in my cubicle at the newspaper, during the time I was investigating the family’s past for a first novel I never finished, and he proposed that we look into the assault together. He never gave up. The last time I saw him in Cartagena
de Indias, when he was old and his heart had cracked, he said goodbye to me with a sad smile:

“I don’t know how you can be a writer with such a bad memory.”

When there was nothing more to do in Aracataca, my father took us to live in Barranquilla again, to open another pharmacy without a centavo of capital but with good credit from the wholesalers who had been his partners in earlier businesses.
It was not the fifth drugstore, as we used to say in the family, but the same old one that we took from city to city depending on Papá’s commercial hunches: twice in Barranquilla, twice in Aracataca, and once in Sincé. In all of them he’d had precarious profits and salvageable debts. The family without grandparents or uncles or aunts or servants was reduced then to parents and children—there
were six of us, three boys and three girls—in nine years of marriage.

I felt very uneasy about this change in my life. I had been in Barranquilla several times to visit my parents, as a boy and always in passing, and my memories of that time are very fragmentary. The first visit took place when I was three and had been brought there for the birth of my sister Margot. I remember the stink of mud
in the port at dawn, the one-horse carriage whose coachman used his whip to drive away the porters who tried to climb onto the driver’s seat on the deserted, dusty streets. I remember the ocher walls and the green wood of doors and windows in the maternity hospital where the baby was born, and the strong smell of medicine in the room. The infant was in a very simple iron bed at the rear of a desolate
room, with a woman who no doubt was my mother, but I can recall only a faceless presence who held out a languid hand to me and said with a sigh:

“You don’t remember me anymore.”

Nothing more. The first concrete image I have of her is from several years later; it is clear and certain, but I have not been able to situate it in time. It must have been on a visit she made to Aracataca after the
birth of Aida Rosa, my second sister. I was in the courtyard, playing with a newborn lamb that Santos Villero had carried in her arms from Fonseca for me, when Aunt Mama came running and told me with a shout that I thought came from fear:

“Your mamá’s here!”

She almost dragged me to the living room, where all the women in the house and some female neighbors were sitting in chairs lined up along
the walls, as if it were a wake. The conversation was interrupted by my sudden entrance. I stood petrified in the door, not knowing which of all those women was my mother, until she opened her arms to me and said in the most loving voice I can remember:

“But you’ve grown into a man!”

She had a beautiful Roman nose, and she was dignified and pale, and more distinguished than ever because of that
year’s fashion: a silk dress the color of marble with a waist dropped to the hips, several loops of a pearl necklace, silver shoes with an instep strap and high heels, and a hat of fine straw in the shape of a bell like the ones in silent movies. Her embrace surrounded me in the particular scent I always smelled on her, and a lightning flash of guilt shook me body and soul because I knew that
my duty was to love her but I felt that I did not.

On the other hand, the oldest memory I have of my father is clear and confirmed on December 1, 1934, the day he turned thirty-three. I saw him walking with rapid, joyful strides into my grandparents’ house in Cataca, wearing a three-piece white linen suit and a straw boater. Someone who congratulated him with a hug asked him how old he was. I
never forgot his answer because at the time I did not understand it:

“The age of Christ.”

I have always wondered why that memory seems so old to me, when it is certain that by then I had been with my father many times.

We had never lived in the same house, but after Margot’s birth my grandparents adopted the custom of taking me to Barranquilla, so that when Aida Rosa was born it was less strange
to me. I believe it was a happy house. They had a pharmacy there, and later they opened another in the business center. We saw my grandmother Argemira—Mamá Gime—again, and two of her children, Julio and Enga, who was very beautiful but famous in the family for her bad luck. She died at the age of twenty-five, no one knows of what, and people still say it was because of a
rejected suitor’s curse.
As we grew up, Mamá Gime seemed more amiable and foulmouthed to me.

During this same period my parents were responsible for an emotional mishap that left me with a scar difficult to erase. It happened one day when my mother suffered an attack of nostalgia and sat down at the piano to play “After the Ball Is Over,” the historic waltz of her secret love, and Papá had the romantic idea of dusting
off his violin to accompany her, even though it was missing a string. She adjusted without difficulty to his romantic middle-of-the-night style and played better than ever, until she looked at him with pleasure over her shoulder and realized that his eyes were wet with tears. “Who are you remembering?” my mother asked with ferocious innocence. “The first time we played this together,” he answered,
inspired by the waltz. Then my mother slammed both fists down on the keyboard in a rage.

“It wasn’t with me, you Jesuit!” she shouted at the top of her voice. “You know very well who you played it with and you’re crying for her.”

She did not say her name, not then and not ever, but her shout petrified all of us with panic wherever we were in the house. Luis Enrique and I, who always had secret
reasons to be afraid, hid under our beds. Aida ran to the house next door, and Margot contracted a sudden fever that kept her delirious for three days. Even the younger children were accustomed to my mother’s explosions of jealousy, her eyes in flames and her Roman nose sharpened like a knife. We had seen her take down the pictures in the living room with strange serenity and smash them one after
the other on the floor in a noisy hailstorm of glass. We had caught her sniffing every article of Papá’s clothing before tossing them in the laundry basket. Nothing else happened after the night of the tragic duet, but the Florentine tuner took away the piano to sell it, and the violin—along with the revolver—ended up rotting in the closet.

At that time Barranquilla was an outpost of civil progress,
gentle liberalism, and political coexistence. Decisive factors in its growth and prosperity were the end of more than a century of civil wars that had devastated the country since its independence
from Spain, and then the collapse of the banana region that had been wounded beyond measure by the fierce repression unleashed on it after the great strike.

Still, until that time nothing could resist
the enterprising spirit of its people. In 1919, the young industrialist Mario Santodomingo—the father of Julio Mario—had won civic glory by inaugurating the national air-mail service with fifty-seven letters in a canvas sack that he threw on the beach of Puerto Colombia, five leagues from Barranquilla, from a primitive airplane piloted by a North American, William Knox Martin. At the end of the
First World War a group of German aviators—including Helmuth von Krohn—came to the country and established air routes with Junker F-13s, the first amphibious planes that traveled the Magdalena River like providential grasshoppers carrying six intrepid passengers and large sacks of mail. This was the embryo of the Colombian-German Air Transport Company, or SCADTA, one of the oldest firms of its kind
in the world.

Our last move to Barranquilla was, for me, not a simple change of city and house but a change of Papá at the age of eleven. The new one was a fine man, but with a sense of paternal authority very different from the one that had made Margarita and me happy in my grandparents’ house. Accustomed to being our own masters, we found it very difficult to adjust to another regime. Among
his most admirable and moving qualities, Papá was an absolute autodidact and the most voracious reader I have ever known, though he was also the least systematic. After he left medical school he dedicated himself to studying homeopathy on his own, for at that time academic training was not required, and he obtained his license with honors. On the other hand, he did not have my mother’s courage in
facing crises. He spent the worst ones in the hammock in his room, reading every piece of printed paper he came across and solving crossword puzzles. But his problem with reality was insoluble. He had an almost mythical devotion to the rich, not those who could not be explained but men who had made their money by dint of talent and integrity. Restless in his hammock even in the middle of the day,
he would accumulate vast fortunes
in his imagination with undertakings so simple he could not understand how they had not occurred to him before. He liked to cite as an example the strangest riches he knew of in Darién: two hundred leagues of sows that had just given birth. Nonetheless, those extraordinary enterprises were not to be found in the places where we lived but in lost paradises he had
heard of in his wanderings as a telegraph operator. His fatal impracticality kept us suspended between setbacks and relapses, but there were also long periods when not even the crumbs of our daily bread fell from heaven. In any case, in good times and bad, our parents taught us to celebrate the one and endure the other with the submission and dignity of old-style Catholics.

The only trial left
for me was to travel alone with my papá, and I had the experience in its entirety when he took me to Barranquilla to help him set up the pharmacy and prepare for the arrival of the family. I was surprised that when we were alone he treated me as an older person, with affection and respect, and even assigned me tasks that did not seem easy for someone my age, but I did them well and was pleased,
though he did not always agree. He was in the habit of telling us stories about his childhood in his hometown, but he repeated them year after year for each new child, so that they began to lose their charm for those of us who already knew them. In fact, we older ones would get up from the table when he began to recount them after meals. Luis Enrique, in another of his attacks of frankness, offended
him when he said as he walked away: