Living to Tell the Tale (48 page)

In the end it was clear to me that my new friends read Quevedo and James Joyce with the same pleasure they derived from reading Arthur Conan Doyle. They had an inexhaustible sense of humor and were capable of spending whole nights singing boleros and
vallenatos
or reciting without hesitation the best poetry of the Golden
Age. By different paths we came to agree that the summit of world poetry are the stanzas of Don Jorge Manrique on the death of his father. The night turned into a delicious entertainment that did away with any last prejudices that could have hindered my friendship with this band of learned maniacs. I felt so comfortable with them and the barbarous rum that I took off the straitjacket of my shyness.
Susana the Perverse, who in March of that year had won the dance contest during Carnival, asked me to dance. They shooed
the chickens and curlews away from the floor and stood in a circle around us to encourage us.

We danced the series of Dámaso Pérez Prado’s
Mambo No. 5.
With the breath I had left I took over the maracas on the tropical group’s platform and for more than an hour I sang without
stopping boleros of Daniel Santos, Agustín Lara, and Bienvenido Granda. As I sang I felt redeemed by a wind of liberation. I never knew if the three of them were proud or ashamed of me, but when I went back to the table they greeted me as one of their own.

Álvaro had begun a topic that the others never discussed with him: the movies. For me it was a providential discovery, because I always had
considered movies a subsidiary art nourished more by the theater than the novel. But Álvaro viewed film, in a sense, as I viewed music: as an art that was useful to all the others.

At dawn, when he was both sleepy and drunk, Álvaro drove the car crammed with recent books and literary supplements of the
New York Times
as if he were a master cab driver. We dropped Germán and Alfonso at their houses,
and Álvaro insisted on taking me to his to see his library, which covered three walls, floor to ceiling, of his bedroom. He made a complete turn, pointing at them with his index finger, and said:

“These are the only writers in the world who know how to write.”

I was in a state of excitement that made me forget what yesterday had been hunger and fatigue. The alcohol was still alive inside me
like a state of grace. Álvaro showed me his favorite books, in Spanish and English, and he spoke of each one with his rusty voice, his disheveled hair, his eyes more demented than ever. He spoke of Azorín and Saroyan—two weaknesses of his—and of others whose public and private lives he knew down to their underwear. It was the first time I heard the name of Virginia Woolf, whom he called Old Lady Woolf,
like Old Man Faulkner. My amazement inspired him to the point of delirium. He seized the pile of books he had shown me as his favorites and placed them in my hands.

“Don’t be an asshole,” he said, “take them all, and when you
finish reading them we’ll come get them no matter where you are.”

For me they were an inconceivable treasure that I did not dare put at risk when I did not have even a
miserable hole where I could keep them. At last he resigned himself to giving me the Spanish version of Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway,
with the unappealable prediction that I would learn it by heart.

Day was breaking. I wanted to go back to Cartagena on the first bus, but Álvaro insisted that I sleep in the other twin bed.

“What the hell!” he said with his last bit of strength. “Come live here
and tomorrow we’ll find you a fabulous job.”

I lay down in my clothes on the bed, and only then did I feel in my body the immense weight of being alive. He did the same and we slept until eleven in the morning, when his mother, the adored and feared Sara Samudio, knocked on the door with a clenched fist, believing that the only child of her life was dead.

“Don’t pay attention to her, Maestro,”
Álvaro said to me from the depths of sleep. “Every morning she says the same thing, and the serious part is that one day it’ll be true.”

I went back to Cartagena with the air of someone who had discovered the world. Then the recitations after meals in the house of the Franco Múnera family were not poems of the Golden Age and Neruda’s
Twenty Love Poems,
but paragraphs from
Mrs. Dalloway
and the
ravings of its heartbreaking character, Septimus Warren Smith. I turned into another person, restless and difficult, to the point where Héctor and Maestro Zabala thought I had become a conscious imitator of Álvaro Cepeda. Gustavo Ibarra, with his compassionate vision of the Caribbean heart, was amused by my tale of the night in Barranquilla, while he gave me more and more rational spoonfuls of Greek
poets, with the express and never-explained exception of Euripides. He introduced me to Melville: the literary feat of
Moby-Dick,
the magnificent sermon about Jonah for whalers weathered on all the oceans of the world under the immense dome constructed with the ribs of whales. He lent me Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The House of the Seven Gables,
which marked me for life. Together we attempted a theory
of the fatality of nostalgia in the wanderings of Ulysses Odysseus, where we became
lost and never found our way out. Half a century later I discovered it resolved in a masterful text by Milan Kundera.

During this same period I had my sole encounter with the great poet Luis Carlos López, better known as El Tuerto, or One-eye, who had invented a comfortable way of being dead without dying, and
buried without a funeral, and above all without orations. He lived in the historic center in a historic house on the historic Calle del Tablón, where he was born and lived without disturbing anyone. He saw a very few old friends, while his reputation for being a great poet continued to grow in his lifetime as only posthumous glory grows.

They called him one-eyed even though he was not, because
in reality he was only cross-eyed, but in an unusual way that was very difficult to characterize. His brother, Domingo López Escauriaza, the publisher of
El Universal,
always had the same answer for those who asked about him:

“He’s there.”

It seemed an evasion, but it was the only truth: he was there. More alive than anyone else, but also with the advantage of being alive without anyone finding
out too much, aware of everything, and determined to walk to his own funeral. People spoke of him as if he were a historical relic, in particular those who had not read him. In fact, since my arrival in Cartagena I had not tried to see him, out of respect for his privileges as an invisible man. At the time he was sixty-eight years old, and no one had any doubt that he was a great poet for the
ages, though there were not many of us who knew who he was or why, and it was not easy to believe because of the rare quality of his work.

Zabala, Rojas Herazo, Gustavo Ibarra: we all knew poems of his by heart and always quoted them without thinking, in a spontaneous and knowledgeable way, to illuminate our conversations. He was not unsociable but shy. Even today I do not remember having seen
a portrait of him, if there was one, only some quick caricatures that were published instead. I believe that because we did not see him we had forgotten he was still alive, and one night when I was finishing my piece for the day, I heard a stifled exclamation from Zabala:

“Damn, it’s El Tuerto!”

I looked up from the typewriter and saw the strangest man I would ever see. Much shorter than we
had imagined, with hair so white it looked blue and so unruly it looked borrowed. His left eye was not missing, but as his nickname indicated, it was crossed.
^*
He dressed as if he were at home, in dark drill trousers and a striped shirt, his right hand, at the height of his shoulder, holding a silver holder with a lit cigarette that he did not smoke and whose ash fell without tapping when it could
no longer hold on by itself.

He walked through to his brother’s office and came out two hours later, when only Zabala and I were left in the newsroom, waiting to greet him. He died two years later, and the upheaval it caused among the faithful seemed to be not because he had died but because he had been resuscitated. On view in his coffin he did not appear as dead as when he was alive.

During
the same period the Spanish writer Dámaso Alonso and his wife, the novelist Eulalia Galvarriato, gave two lectures in the main auditorium of the university. Maestro Zabala, who did not like to disturb anyone’s life, for once overcame his circumspection and requested a meeting. Gustavo Ibarra, Héctor Rojas Herazo, and I accompanied him, and there was an immediate chemistry with them. We stayed some
four hours in a private meeting room in the Hotel del Caribe, exchanging impressions of their first trip to Latin America and our dreams as new writers. Héctor brought them a book of poems, and I had a photocopy of a story published in
El Espectador.
What interested both of us most was the frankness of their reservations, because they used them as oblique confirmations of their praise.

In October
I found a message from Gonzalo Mallarino at
El Universal
saying that he was waiting for me, with the poet Álvaro Mutis, in Villa Tulipán, an unforgettable
pensión
in the beach resort of Bocagrande, a few meters from the place where Charles Lindbergh had landed some twenty years earlier. Gonzalo, my accomplice in private recitations at the university, was
already a practicing attorney, and in his
capacity as head of public relations for LANSA, a national airline founded by its own pilots, Mutis had invited him so to see the ocean.

Poems by Mutis and stories of mine had coincided at least once in “Fin de Semana,” and it was enough for us to see each other to begin a conversation that is still going on, in countless places in the world, after more than half a century. First our children
and then our grandchildren have often asked us what we talk about with such fierce passion, and we tell them the truth: we always talk about the same thing.

My miraculous friendships with adults in arts and letters gave me the courage to survive those years, which I still remember as the most uncertain of my life. On July 10 I had published the last “Period. New Paragraph” in
El Universal,
after
three arduous months in which I could not overcome the obstacles of being a novice, and I preferred to stop writing it, the sole merit being that I would escape in time. I took refuge in the impunity of commentaries on the editorial page, unsigned except when they needed a personal touch. I kept this up through sheer routine until September 1950, with a pompous note on Edgar Allan Poe, its sole
merit being that it was the worst of them.

During all that year I had persisted in asking Maestro Zabala to teach me the secrets of writing feature articles. He never decided to, given his mysterious nature, but he left me troubled by the enigma of a twelve-year-old girl, buried in the Convent of Santa Clara, whose hair grew after her death, more than twenty meters in two centuries. I never imagined
I would return to this subject forty years later and recount it in a romantic novel with sinister implications. But these were not my best days for thinking. I had fits of rage for any reason at all, and would disappear from work with no explanations until Maestro Zabala sent someone to calm me down. I passed the final exams of the second year of law by a stroke of luck, with only two subjects
to make up, and I was able to matriculate for the third year, but a rumor circulated that I had achieved this through political pressure from the paper. The publisher had to intervene when I was stopped coming out of the movies carrying a false record
of military service, and I was on the list to be sent on punitive missions to enforce public order.

In my political obfuscation at the time, I
did not even know that martial law had been reimposed in the country because of the increase in lawlessness. Press censorship was tightened a few more turns. The atmosphere rarefied as it did in the worst times, and a political police reinforced with common criminals sowed panic in the countryside. The violence obliged Liberals to abandon lands and homes. Their possible candidate, Darío Echandía,
the teacher of teachers of civil law, a born skeptic and habitual reader of Greek and Latin authors, pronounced in favor of a Liberal abstention at the polls. The way was open for the election of Laureano Gómez, who seemed to direct the government from New York with invisible strings.

I did not have a clear awareness then that these misfortunes were not only the infamies of the Goths but symptoms
of evil changes in our lives, until one of many nights at La Cueva, when it occurred to me to boast about my freedom to do whatever I wished. Maestro Zabala held in midair the spoonful of soup he was about to eat, looking at me over the arch of his eyeglasses, and stopped me cold:

“Just tell me one thing, Gabriel: in the midst of all the damn fool things you do, have you been able to realize
that this country is coming to an end?”

The question hit its mark. I was dead drunk when I lay down at dawn to sleep on a bench on the Paseo de los Mártires, and a biblical downpour left me soaked to the skin. I spent two weeks in the hospital with a pneumonia resistant to the first known antibiotics, which had a bad reputation for causing side effects as terrifying as premature impotence. I
was more skeletal and pale than I was by nature, and my parents called me back to Sucre to help me recuperate from an excess of work—as they said in their letter.
El Universal
went even further, with a farewell editorial that sanctified me as a journalist and writer of masterful talents, and another that cited me as the author of a novel that never existed and with a title that was not mine:
We’ve Already Cut the Hay.
Even stranger at a time when I had
no intention of backsliding into fiction. The truth is that this title, so alien to me, was invented by Héctor Rojas Herazo while he was typing, as one more contribution from César Guerra Valdés, an imaginary writer of the purest Latin American stock created by him to enrich our polemics. Héctor had published news of his arrival in Cartagena
in
El Universal,
and I had written him a greeting in “Period. New Paragraph” in the hope of shaking the dust from the dormant awareness of an authentic continental narrative. In any case, the imaginary novel with the beautiful title invented by Héctor was reviewed years later in an essay on my books, I do not know where or why, as a fundamental work of the new literature.