Living to Tell the Tale (45 page)

My sleep was restless that night. The next day at breakfast I asked the landlady of the hotel where Calle de San Juan de Dios
was, and she pointed it out to me through the window.

“It’s right there,” she said, “two blocks away.”

The offices of
El Universal
were across from the immense wall of golden stone of the Church of San Pedro Claver, the first saint from the Americas, whose uncorrupted body has been displayed for more than a hundred years beneath the main altar. It was an old colonial building embroidered with
republican patches, and two large doors, and windows through which you could see everything that the newspaper was. But my real terror sat behind an unpolished wooden railing some three meters from the window: a mature, solitary man dressed in white drill,
with a jacket and tie, a swarthy complexion, and the coarse black hair of an Indian, who was writing with a pencil at an old desk that had
stacks of papers needing attention. I passed by again in the opposite direction, feeling an urgent fascination, and then two more times, and the fourth time, as on the first, I did not have the slightest doubt that the man was Clemente Manuel Zabala, just as I had supposed him to be, but more frightening. Terrified, I made the simple decision not to keep that afternoon’s appointment with a man you
only had to see through a window to discover that he knew too much about life and its professions. I returned to the hotel and presented myself with another of my typical days without regret, lying on my back on the bed with Gide’s
The Counterfeiters,
and smoking without letup. At five in the afternoon, the door to the dormitory was shaken by an open palm delivering a blow as dry as a rifle shot.

“Let’s go, damn it!” Zapata Olivella shouted at me from the entrance. “Zabala’s waiting for you, and nobody in this country can allow himself the luxury of standing him up.”

The beginning was more difficult than I could have imagined in a nightmare. Zabala received me not knowing what to do, smoking without pause, his uneasiness made worse by the heat. He showed us everything. On one side, the
offices of the publisher and the manager, on the other the newsroom and typesetting shop with three empty desks at that early hour, and in the rear a rotary printing press that had survived a riot, and their only two linotypes.

My great surprise was that Zabala had read my three stories, and Zalamea’s note had seemed fair to him.

“Not to me,” I said. “I don’t like the stories. I wrote them on
somewhat unconscious impulses, and after I read them in print I didn’t know how to continue.”

Zabala inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs and said to Zapata Olivella:

“That’s a good sign.”

Manuel seized the opportunity and said I could be useful at the paper in the time I had free from the university. Zabala said he had thought the same thing when Manuel asked him
to make an appointment with
me. He introduced me to Dr. López Escauriaza, the publisher, as the possible contributor about whom he had spoken the night before.

“That would be wonderful,” said the publisher with his eternal smile of an old-fashioned gentleman.

We did not arrange anything but Maestro Zabala asked me to come back the next day to meet Héctor Rojas Heraza, a fine poet and painter and his star columnist. Because
of a timidity that today I find inexplicable, I did not tell him he had been my drawing teacher at the Colegio San José. When we left, Manuel gave a great leap on the Plaza de la Aduana, across from the imposing facade of San Pedro Claver, and exclaimed with premature jubilation:

“You see, tiger, the whole thing’s taken care of!”

I responded with a cordial hug so as not to disillusion him, but
I had serious doubts about my future. Then Manuel asked me what I had thought of Zabala, and I told him the truth. He seemed like a fisher of souls to me. Perhaps that was a determining reason for the groups of young people who were nourished by his reason and circumspection. I concluded, no doubt with the false estimation of a premature old man, that perhaps this disposition of his had prevented
him from playing a decisive role in the public life of the country.

Manuel called me that night weak with laughter because of a conversation he had with Zabala, who spoke of me with great enthusiasm, reiterated his certainty that I would be an important acquisition for the editorial page, and said the publisher was of the same opinion. But the real reason for his call was to tell me that the
only thing that disturbed Maestro Zabala was that my unhealthy timidity might be a great obstacle to me in my life.

If at the last minute I decided to go back to the paper, it was because the next morning one of my roommates opened the door to the shower and held the editorial page of
El Universal
up to my eyes. There was a terrifying note about my arrival in the city, which committed me as a
writer before I was one and as an imminent journalist less than twenty-four hours after I had seen the inside of a newspaper for the first time. I
reproached Manuel, who called me without delay to congratulate me, and I did not hide my anger at his writing something so irresponsible without speaking to me first. But something changed in me, perhaps forever, when I learned that it was Maestro Zabala
who had written the note in his own hand. And so I fastened my trousers and went back to the newsroom to thank him. He paid little attention. He introduced me to Héctor Rojas Herazo, with his khaki pants and shirt with Amazonian flowers and enormous words fired off in a voice of thunder, who did not yield in a conversation until he had trapped his prey. He, of course, did not recognize me as
one more of his students at the Colegio San José in Barranquilla.

Maestro Zabala—as everyone called him—put us in his orbit with memories of two or three mutual friends, and some others whom I ought to know. Then he left us alone and returned to the fierce battle of his blood-red pencil and his urgent papers, as if he had never had anything to do with us. Héctor continued talking to me in the
light drizzling noise of the linotypes as if he had never had anything to do with Zabala either. He was an infinite conversationalist with a dazzling verbal intelligence, an adventurer of the imagination who invented improbable realities that he himself came to believe. We talked for hours about other friends living and dead, about books that never should have been written, about women who forgot
us and whom we could not forget, about the idyllic beaches in the Caribbean paradise of Tolú—where he had been born—and about the infallible wizards and biblical misfortunes of Aracataca. About everything that had been and should be, not drinking, almost not taking a breath, and smoking without pause for fear that life would not last long enough for everything we still had to talk about.

At ten
o’clock that night, when the paper went to press, Maestro Zabala put on his jacket, tightened his tie, and with a ballet dancer’s step that had little youth left in it, he invited us to eat. At La Cueva, of course, where to their surprise José Dolores and several of his late-night diners recognized me as an old patron. Their surprise increased when one of the policemen from my first visit passed
by, made an equivocal joke about
the bad night I had spent at the barracks, and confiscated a pack of cigarettes I had just opened. Héctor, in turn, started a tourney of double entendres with José Dolores that had the other patrons bursting with laughter while Maestro Zabala maintained a contented silence. I dared interject a reply without wit that at least allowed me to be recognized as one of
the few clients José Dolores favored by serving them on credit up to four times a month.

After the meal, Héctor and I continued the afternoon’s conversation on the Paseo de los Mártires, which faced the bay polluted by republican garbage from the public market. It was a splendid night at the center of the world, and the first schooners from Curaçao were dropping anchor in secret. That night Héctor
gave me my first insights into the underground history of Cartagena, concealed by sympathetic friends, which perhaps resembled the truth more than the amiable fiction of the academics. He told me about the lives of the ten martyrs whose marble busts were on both sides of the promenade as a memorial to their heroism. The popular version—which seemed to be his—was that when they were set in their
original places, the sculptors had not carved the names and dates on the busts but on the pedestals. When they were dismantled to be cleaned for their centenary, no one knew which busts corresponded to which names and dates, and they had to be put back on the pedestals at random because no one knew who they were. The story had circulated as a joke for many years, but I, on the contrary, thought
it had been an act of historical justice to erect a monument to heroes who were nameless not so much because of the lives they had lived as because of the destiny they had shared.

Those nights without sleep were repeated almost on a daily basis during my years in Cartagena, but after the first two or three I realized that Héctor had the power of immediate seduction, with a sense of friendship
so complex that only those of us who loved him a good deal could understand it without reservation. For his tenderheartedness was unqualified, but at the same time he was capable of deafening and at times catastrophic rages, which he celebrated afterward with the innocence
of the Holy Infant. One understood then how he was, and why Maestro Zabala did everything possible to have us love him as
much as he did. On that first night, as on so many others, we stayed on the Paseo de los Mártires until dawn, protected from the curfew because of our status as reporters. Héctor’s voice and memory were intact when he saw the radiance of the new day on the sea’s horizon, and he said:

“If only tonight would end like
Casablanca.
”

He did not say anything else, but his voice brought back to me in
all its splendor the image of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains walking shoulder to shoulder through the fog at dawn toward the radiant light on the horizon, and the now legendary sentence of that tragic happy ending: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Three hours later Maestro Zabala woke me by telephone with a less happy phrase:

“How’s that masterpiece coming along?”

I needed a few minutes to understand that he was referring to my piece for the next day’s paper. I do not remember our having closed any deal or my having said either yes or no when he asked me to write my first contribution, but that morning I felt capable of anything after the verbal Olympiad of the previous night. Zabala must have understood matters in this way, because he already had indicated
some current topics and I proposed another that seemed more immediate: the curfew.

He gave me no orientation. My intention was to recount the adventure of my first night in Cartagena, which is what I did, in my own hand, because I could not manage the prehistoric typewriters in the newsroom. It took almost four hours to produce, and the maestro revised it in front of me without any expression
that would reveal his thinking, until he found the least bitter way to tell me:

“It’s not bad, but publishing it is impossible.”

I was not surprised. On the contrary, I had foreseen it, and for a few minutes I was relieved of the unpleasant burden of being a journalist. But his real reasons, which I did not know, were conclusive: since April 9, in every newspaper in the country, beginning at
six in the evening, a government censor installed
himself at a desk in the newsroom as if he were in his own house, with the intention and the power not to authorize a single letter that might interfere with public order.

Zabala’s motives weighed on me much more than the government’s, because I had written not a press commentary but a subjective recounting of a personal incident with no pretensions
to editorial journalism. Further, I had treated the curfew not as a legitimate instrument of the state but as the pretext for ignorant police officers to obtain cigarettes for a centavo each. It was my good fortune that before condemning me to death, Maestro Zabala returned the article, which I had to rewrite from top to bottom, not for him but for the censor, and he had the charity to pronounce
a two-edged verdict.

“It has literary merit, there’s no question,” he said. “But we’ll talk about that later.”

That is how he was. From my first day at the paper, when Zabala conversed with me and with Zapata Olivella, I was struck by his unusual habit of talking to one while looking in the face of the other as his nails were singed by the burning end of his cigarette. At first this caused an
uncomfortable insecurity in me. The least foolish thing that occurred to me, out of sheer timidity, was to listen to him with real attention and enormous interest, and not look at him but at Manuel in order to draw my own conclusions from both of them. Afterward, when we spoke with Rojas Herazo, and then with the publisher López Escauriaza, and with so many others, I realized it was Zabala’s own
method for conversing in a group. I understood it in this way, and in this way he and I could exchange ideas and feelings through unwary accomplices and innocent intermediaries. With the confidence of many years I dared to tell him about this impression of mine, and he explained with no surprise that he looked at the other person almost in profile so as not to blow cigarette smoke in his face. That
is how he was: I never met anyone with so peaceable and reserved a nature, with a temperament as civil as his, because he always knew how to be what he wanted to be: a wise man in the shadows.

In reality, I had written speeches, premature verses at the
liceo
in Zipaquirá, patriotic proclamations, petitions to protest
the bad food, and very little else, not counting the letters to my family that
my mother would send back with the spelling corrected even when I had been recognized as a writer. The piece that at last was published on the editorial page had nothing to do with the one I had written. Between the emendations of Maestro Zabala and those of the censor, what remained of mine were some scraps of lyrical prose lacking discernment or style and finished off by the grammatical sectarianism
of the proofreader. At the last minute we agreed on a daily column, perhaps to delimit responsibilities, with my complete name and a permanent title: “Period. New Paragraph.”