Living to Tell the Tale (39 page)

The publications in
El Espectador,
on the margins of literary success, created other more terrestrial and amusing problems for me. Misguided friends would stop me in the street to ask for the loans that would save
them, since they could not believe that a writer displayed with so much prominence had not received enormous sums for his stories. Very few believed the truth when I told them I had never been paid a centavo for their publication nor had I expected it, because that was not the custom in the country’s press. Even more serious was my papá’s disappointment when he became convinced I could not take
over my own expenses when three of the eleven children who had already been born were in school. The family sent me thirty
pesos a month. The
pensión
alone cost me eighteen with no right to eggs at breakfast, and I always found myself obliged to dip into that money for unforeseen expenses. I do not know where I had acquired the habit of making unconscious sketches in the margins of newspapers,
on the napkins in restaurants, on the marble tables in cafés. I dare to believe that those drawings were direct descendants of the ones I had painted as a child on the walls of my grandfather’s workshop, and that perhaps they were easy outlets for my feelings. A casual acquaintance from El Molino with enough influence at a ministry to be placed as a draftsman without having the slightest idea about
drawing proposed that I do the work for him and we divide the salary. Never again in my life was I so close to being corrupted, but not so close that I repented.

My interest in music also grew at this time, when the popular songs of the Caribbean—which I had taken in with my mother’s milk—were making their way into Bogotá. The radio program with the largest audience was
The Coastal Hour,
animated
by Don Pascual Delvecchio, a kind of musical consul of the Atlantic coast in the capital. It had become so popular on Sunday mornings that we students from the Caribbean would go to dance in the offices of the radio station until late in the afternoon. That was the origin of the immense popularity of our music in the interior of the country, and then even in its most remote corners, and of social
advancement in Bogotá for students from the coast.

The only disadvantage was the phantom of obligatory marriage. I do not know what wicked precedents had advanced the coastal belief that the girls in Bogotá were loose with boys from the coast and set traps for us in bed so that we would be obliged to marry them. And not for love but because they hoped to live with a window facing the sea. I never
believed it. On the contrary, the most disagreeable memories of my life are the sinister brothels on the outskirts of Bogotá where we would go to drain away our gloomy bouts of drunkenness. In the most sordid of them, I almost left behind the little life I had inside me when a woman I had just been with appeared naked in the corridor, shouting that I had stolen twelve pesos from a drawer in her
dressing table. Two thugs from the house knocked me down, and not satisfied with emptying my pockets of the two pesos I had left after a ruinous lovemaking, they stripped me of everything including my shoes to search every inch for the stolen money. In any event, they had decided not to kill me but to turn me over to the police when the woman remembered that the day before she had changed the
hiding place for her money, and she found it intact.

Among the friendships I still had from the university, that of Camilo Torres not only was the least forgettable but also the most dramatic of our youth. One day, for the first time, he did not attend classes. The reason spread like wildfire. He had arranged his things and decided to leave home for the seminary at Chiquinquirá, some one hundred
kilometers from Bogotá. His mother overtook him at the railroad station and locked him in the library. I visited him there, and he was paler than usual and wearing a white poncho, and he had a serenity that for the first time made me think of a state of grace. He decided to enter the seminary because of a vocation he had hidden very well but was resolved to obey to the end.

“The most difficult
part is over,” he said.

It was his way of telling me that he had said goodbye to his girlfriend, and that she approved of his decision. After a resplendent afternoon he gave me an indecipherable gift: Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species.
I said goodbye to him with the strange certainty I would not see him again.

I lost touch with him while he was in the seminary. I heard vague reports that he
had gone to Lovaina for three years of theological training, that his devotion had not changed his student’s spirit and lay manners, and that the girls who sighed for him treated him like a movie star who had been disarmed by a cassock.

Ten years later, when he returned to Bogotá, he had assumed in body and soul the character of his investiture but preserved the best virtues of an adolescent.
By then I was a writer and a journalist without a byline, married and with a son, Rodrigo, who had been born on August 24, 1959, in the Palermo Hospital in Bogotá. At home we decided that Camilo should baptize
him. His godfather would be Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, with whom my wife and I had long ago established a friendship of
compadres.
His godmother would be Susana Linares, the wife of Germán
Vargas, who had transmitted to me his skills as a good reporter and a better friend. Camilo was closer to Plinio than we were and had been his friend for a much longer time, but he did not want to accept him as the godfather because of his kinship at the time with the Communists, and perhaps, too, because of his mocking spirit that might well destroy the solemnity of the sacrament. Susana agreed to
be responsible for the spiritual formation of the child, and Camilo did not find, or did not wish to find, other arguments that would block the godfather’s way.

The baptism took place in the chapel of the Palermo Hospital, in the icy gloom of six in the evening, with no one present except the godparents and I, and a campesino in a poncho and sandals who approached as if he were levitating in
order to attend the ceremony without being noticed. When Susana arrived with the newborn, his incorrigible godfather let fly as a joke his first provocation:

“We’re going to make this boy into a great guerrilla fighter.”

Camilo, preparing the articles for the sacrament, counterattacked in the same tone: “Yes, but a guerrilla fighter for God.” And he began the ceremony with the highest-caliber
decisiveness, not at all usual in those years:

“I am going to baptize him in Spanish so that unbelievers can understand what this sacrament signifies.”

His voice resonated in a high-sounding Castilian that I followed through the Latin of my early years as an altar boy in Aracataca. At the moment of the ablution, without looking at anyone, Camilo invented another provocative formula:

“Those
who believe that at this moment the Holy Spirit has descended on this infant, let them kneel.”

The godparents and I remained standing, perhaps somewhat discomfited by the glibness of our friend the priest, while the baby bellowed under the inflexible stream of water. The only one who kneeled was the campesino in sandals. The impact of this episode remained with me as one of the harsh reprimands
in my life, because I have always believed that it was Camilo who brought in the campesino with complete premeditation in order to punish us with a lesson in humility. Or, at least, in good manners.

I saw him only a few times after that, and always for some valid and pressing reason, most of the time having to do with his charitable work to benefit those who suffered political persecution. One
morning he appeared at my house soon after I had married, accompanied by a thief who had served his sentence, yet the police would not leave him in peace: they stole everything he had. Once I gave him a pair of hiking boots with a special design on the sole for greater safety. A few days later, the maid recognized the soles in the photograph of a street criminal who had been found dead in a ditch.
It was our friend the thief.

I do not pretend that this episode had anything to do with Camilo’s ultimate destiny, but months later he entered the military hospital to visit a sick friend, and nothing more was known about him until the government announced that he had reappeared as an ordinary guerrilla fighter in the Army of National Liberation. He died on February 5, 1966, at the age of thirty-seven,
in open combat with a military patrol.

Camilo’s entering the seminary coincided with my own decision not to go on wasting time in the faculty of law, but I did not have the courage to confront my parents once and for all. Through my brother Luis Enrique—who had come to Bogotá with a good job in February 1948—I knew they were so satisfied with the results of my baccalaureate and my first year
as a law student that they sent me the most lightweight and modern typewriter on the market as a surprise gift. The first one I ever had in this life, and also the most unfortunate, because that same day we pawned it for twelve pesos in order to continue the welcoming party with my brother and my friends from the
pensión.
The next day, crazed with headaches, we went to the pawnshop to make certain
the typewriter was still there with its seals intact, and to be sure it would remain in good condition until the money to redeem it rained down on us from heaven. We had a good opportunity with what my friend the false
draftsman paid me, but at the last minute we decided to put off redeeming it. Each time my brother and I passed the pawnshop, together or alone, we would confirm from the street
that the typewriter was still in its place, wrapped like a jewel in cellophane paper and an organdy bow, among rows of well-protected household appliances. After a month, the joyous calculations we had made in the euphoria of our drunkenness were still unfulfilled, but the typewriter was intact in its place and could remain there as long as we paid the quarterly interest.

I believe we were not
yet aware of the terrible political tensions that were beginning to disturb the country. Despite the prestige as a moderate Conservative with which Ospina Pérez came to power, most members of his party knew his victory had been possible only because of the division among the Liberals. And they, stunned by the blow, reproached Alberto Lleras for his suicidal impartiality that had made defeat possible.
Dr. Gabriel Turbay, more overwhelmed by his depressive nature than by adverse votes, left for Europe without purpose or direction on the pretext of completing an advanced specialization in cardiology, and after a year and a half he died alone, struck down by the asthma of defeat among the paper flowers and faded tapestries of the Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, on the other
hand, did not interrupt for a single day his election campaign for the next term, but radicalized it in a fundamental way with a program of moral renewal of the Republic that went beyond the historic division of the country into Liberals and Conservatives, making it more profound with a horizontal and more realistic distinction between the exploiters and the exploited: the political country and
the national country. With his historic slogan—
“¡A la carga!”
^*
—and his supernatural energy, he sowed the seed of resistance even in the most remote places with a gigantic campaign of agitation that continued gaining ground until, in less than a year, it was on the verge of being an authentic social revolution.

Only in this way did we become aware that the country was beginning to slide into the
abyss of the same civil war we had
been fighting since our independence from Spain and that now was overtaking the great-grandchildren of its original protagonists. The Conservative Party, which had recovered the presidency because of Liberal divisions after four consecutive terms, was determined to use any means not to lose it again. To achieve this, the government of Ospina Pérez pushed forward
a scorched-earth policy that bloodied the country and affected even daily life in people’s homes.

Given my political unawareness and the height of my literary clouds, I had not even suspected this clear reality until one night when I was returning to the
pensión
and encountered the phantom of my conscience. The deserted city, whipped by the glacial wind that blew along the openings in the hills,
was swept by the metallic voice and intentional rough emphasis of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in his obligatory Friday speech at the Teatro Municipal. Its capacity was no more than a thousand crowded people, but the speech was broadcast in concentric waves, first by the loudspeakers in adjacent streets and then by radios played at top volume that resounded like the lashes of a whip over the astonished
city, and for three and even four hours overflowed onto a national audience.

That night I had the impression I was the only person on the streets, except at the crucial corner of the newspaper
El Tiempo,
protected as it was every Friday by a crowd of police armed as if for war. To me it was a revelation, for I had allowed myself the arrogance of not believing in Gaitán, and that night I understood
all at once that he had gone beyond the Spanish country and was inventing a lingua franca for everyone, not so much because of what his words said as for the passion and shrewdness in his voice. In his epic speeches he himself would advise his listeners in a guileful paternal tone to return in peace to their houses, and they would translate that in the correct fashion as a coded order to express
their repudiation of everything that represented social inequalities and the power of a brutal government. Even the police who had to maintain order were stirred by a warning that they interpreted in reverse.

The subject of that night’s speech was an unadorned recounting of the devastation caused by official violence in its scorched-earth
policy meant to destroy the Liberal opposition, with a
still-incalculable number of killings by government forces in the rural areas, and entire populations of homeless, starving refugees in the cities. After a terrifying enumeration of murders and assaults, Gaitán began to raise his voice, to take delight word by word, sentence by sentence, in a marvel of sensationalist, well-aimed rhetoric. The tension in the audience increased to the rhythm of his
voice, until a final outburst exploded within the confines of the city and reverberated on the radio into the most remote corners of the country.