Living to Tell the Tale (60 page)

It was a fatal adventure. Álvaro had formulated the entire plan with models from the United States. Davis Echandía was like God on high, a precursor from the heroic days of local sensationalist journalism and the least decipherable man I ever knew, good by birth and more sentimental than compassionate. The rest of the staff
were a boisterous crop of great hard-hitting reporters, all of them friends and colleagues of many years’ standing. In theory each one had his well-defined orbit, but beyond that no one ever knew who did what, so that the enormous technical mastodon never managed to even take its first step. The few issues that were put out were the result of a heroic act, but no one ever knew whose. When it was
time to go to press, the plates were out of order. Urgent material would disappear, and we would go mad with rage. I do not recall the paper ever coming out on time and without corrections, on account of the crouching devils we had in the printing facilities. No one ever knew what happened. The prevailing explanation was perhaps the least perverse: some aging veterans could not tolerate the renovatory
regime and conspired with their soulmates until they succeeded in destroying the enterprise.

Álvaro left, the door slamming behind him. I had a contract that would have been a guarantee under normal conditions, but under the worst it was a straitjacket. Eager to derive some benefit from the time that had been lost, I attempted to assemble
as fast as I could type any valid pieces with loose ends
that were left over from earlier efforts: fragments of
La casa,
parodies of the truculent Faulkner of
Light in August,
of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dead birds raining down, of the detective stories I had grown tired of because they were repetitive, and some bruises I still had left from the trip to Aracataca with my mother. I was letting them flow as they pleased in my sterile office, where nothing
was left but the chipped, peeling desk and the typewriter breathing its last, until in one sitting I came to the final title: “One Day After Saturday.” One of my few stories that left me satisfied after the first version.

At
El Nacional
I was approached by a salesman peddling wristwatches. I had never had one, for obvious reasons at that time, and the one he was offering was showy and expensive.
Then the salesman himself confessed that he was a member of the Communist Party whose job was to sell watches as bait for catching contributors.

“It’s like buying the revolution on the installment plan,” he said.

I answered in a good-natured way:

“The difference is that I get the watch right away but not the revolution.”

The salesman did not take the bad joke very well, and I ended up buying
the cheapest watch just to make him happy, with a schedule of payments that he would come by to collect every month. It was the first watch I ever owned, and so accurate and durable that I still keep it as a relic of those days.

At this time Álvaro Mutis returned with the news of a vast cultural budget from his company and the imminent appearance of the magazine
Lámpara,
its literary publication.
When he invited me to contribute I proposed an emergency project: the legend of La Sierpe. I thought that if I wanted to tell it one day, it should not be through any rhetorical prism but recovered from the collective imagination as what it was: a geographical and historical truth. That is—at last—a great feature article.

“You do whatever you want and however you want to do it,” Mutis told me.
“But do it, because it has the atmosphere and tone we’re looking for in the magazine.”

I promised he would have it in two weeks. Before he left for the airport he called his office in Bogotá and ordered payment in advance. The check that came in the mail a week later left me breathless. Even more so when I went to cash it and the bank teller was troubled by my appearance. I was obliged to go
to a higher office, where a far too amiable manager asked me where I worked. I answered, as was my habit, that I wrote for
El Heraldo,
although by then it was no longer true. That was all. The manager examined the check on his desk, observed it with an air of professional suspicion, and at last passed judgment:

“This is a perfect document.”

That same afternoon, as I was beginning to write “La
Sierpe,” they told me I had a call from the bank. I began to think that the check was not reliable for any of the countless reasons possible in Colombia. I almost could not swallow the lump in my throat when the bank official, with the dissolute cadence of the Andeans, apologized for not having known at the time that the beggar who cashed the check was the author of “La Jirafa.”

Mutis returned
again at the end of the year. He ate little of his lunch as he helped me think of some stable and permanent way to earn more money without wearing myself out. In the end, what seemed best to him was to let the Cano family know I would be available for
El Espectador,
though the mere idea of returning to Bogotá still put my nerves on edge. But Álvaro never let up when it was a matter of helping
a friend.

“Let’s do this,” he said, “I’m going to send you the fare so you can go whenever you want and however you want, and we’ll see what we can come up with.”

It was too much for me to say no, but I was sure that the last plane in my life had been the one that took me out of Bogotá after April 9. Besides, the scant rights from the soap opera and the projected publication of the first chapter
of “La Sierpe” in the magazine
Lámpara
had gotten me some advertising copy that paid enough for me to send a relief ship to my family in Cartagena. And so once again I resisted the temptation to move to Bogotá.

Álvaro Cepeda, Germán and Alfonso, and most of my friends from the Japy and the Café Roma, spoke to me in good terms about “La Sierpe” when the first chapter was published in
Lámpara
.
They agreed that the direct journalistic solution had been the one best suited to a theme that was on the dangerous frontier of what could not be believed. Alfonso, with his half-joking, half-serious style, told me something I never forgot: “The fact is that credibility, my dear Maestro, depends a good deal on the face you put on when you tell the story.” I was about to reveal to them Álvaro Mutis’s
proposals for a job, but I did not dare to, and today I know it was because of my fear that they would approve. He had pressed me again, even after he made a reservation for me on the plane and I canceled it at the last minute. He gave me his word that he was not delivering a message secondhand for
El Espectador
or any other written or spoken medium. His only purpose—he insisted until the end—was
his desire to talk about a series of fixed contributions to the magazine and to examine some technical details regarding the complete series of “La Sierpe,” whose second chapter was to appear in the upcoming issue. Álvaro Mutis seemed certain that this kind of reporting could be a good kick at trite
costumbrismo
on its own terrain. Of all the reasons he had suggested so far, this was the only
one that left me thinking.

One Tuesday filled with melancholy drizzle, I realized I could not go even if I wanted to because the only clothes I had were my dancer’s shirts. At six in the evening I did not find anyone in the Librería Mundo, and I stood waiting in the doorway, with a knot of tears for the melancholy twilight that was beginning to fall. On the sidewalk across the street was a store
window with formal clothing that I had never seen although it had always been there, and without thinking about what I was doing I crossed Calle San Blas under the ashes of the rain, and walked with a firm step into the most expensive store in the city. I bought a clerical suit of midnight-blue wool, perfect for the spirit of Bogotá at that time, two white shirts with stiff collars, a tie with
diagonal stripes, and a pair of shoes of the kind that the actor José Mojica made fashionable before he became
a saint. The only people whom I told that I was leaving were Germán, Álvaro, and Alfonso, and they approved the decision as a sensible one as long as I did not come back a Cachaco.

We celebrated at El Tercer Hombre with the entire group until dawn, as an advance party for my next birthday,
for Germán Vargas, who was the guardian of the saints’ calendar, let it be known that on March 6 I would be twenty-seven years old. In the midst of the good wishes of my great friends, I felt ready to devour raw the seventy-three I still had left before I celebrated the first hundred.

T
HE PUBLISHER OF
El Espectador,
Guillermo Cano, called me on the phone when he learned I was in Álvaro Mutis’s office, four floors above his in a building that had just opened, about five blocks from his former location. I had arrived the night before
and was getting ready to have lunch with a group of Mutis’s friends, but Guillermo insisted I stop by first to say hello. I did. After the effusive hugs in the style of the capital of fine speech, and a comment or two on the news of the day, he seized me by the arm and moved me away from his colleagues in the newsroom. “Listen to me for a minute, Gabriel,” he said with an innocence that was beyond
suspicion, “why don’t you do me a huge favor and write just a short editorial that I need before we send the paper to press?” With his thumb and index finger he showed me the size of half a glass of water and concluded:

“This long.”

More amused than he was, I asked him where I could sit, and he pointed to an empty desk with a typewriter from another day. I sat down with no further questions,
thinking about a good subject, and I remained seated there in the same chair, at the same desk, and with the same typewriter for the next eighteen months.

Minutes after my arrival Eduardo Zalamea Borda, the
deputy editor, came out of the next office, absorbed in a bundle of papers. He was startled when he recognized me.

“Man! Don Gabo!” he almost shouted, using the name he had invented for me
in Barranquilla as a shortened form of Gabito, and which only he used. But this time it spread around the newsroom and they continued using it even in print: Gabo.

I do not remember the subject of the editorial that Guillermo Cano had me write, but since my days at the Universidad Nacional, I had been very familiar with the dynastic style of
El Espectador.
And in particular the one used in the
section “Day by Day” on the editorial page, which enjoyed a well-deserved prestige, and I decided to imitate it with the sangfroid of Luisa Santiaga confronting the demons of adversity. I finished it in half an hour, made some corrections by hand, and turned it in to Guillermo Cano, who stood as he read it over the arc of his glasses for myopia. His concentration seemed to belong not only to him
but to an entire dynasty of white-haired forebears, begun by Don Fidel Cano, the founder of the paper in 1887, continued by his son Don Luis, consolidated by his brother Don Gabriel, and taken into his bloodstream when it was already mature by his grandson Guillermo, who had just assumed the general management of the paper at the age of twenty-three. Just as his forebears would have done, he made
a few minor revisions and finished with the first practical and simplified use of my new name:

“Very nice, Gabo.”

On the night of my return I had realized that Bogotá would not be the same for me again as long as my memories survived. Like many great catastrophes in the country, April 9 had produced more forgetting than history. The Hotel Granada had been razed in its centenarian park and the
far too new building of the Banco de la República was beginning to rise in its place. The old streets from our time did not seem to belong to anyone but the well-lit streetcars, and the corner of the historic crime had lost its grandeur in the spaces vanquished by fires. “Now it really looks like a big city,” someone who was with us said in astonishment. And finished breaking my heart with the ritual
phrase:

“We have to be grateful for April 9.”

On the other hand, I had never been more comfortable than in the nameless
pensión
where Álvaro Mutis had put me. A house beautified by misfortune, on the side of the Parque Nacional, where on the first night I could not endure the envy I felt toward my neighbors in the next room who were making love as if engaged in joyous battle. The next day, when
I saw them leave, I could not believe they were the same people: a skinny little girl in a dress from a public orphanage and a very old gentleman with silver hair, who was two meters tall and could have been her grandfather. I thought I had been mistaken, but they themselves made sure to confirm it for me every night thereafter, shouting their deaths until dawn.

El Espectador
published my piece
in a prominent position on the editorial page. I spent the morning in large stores buying clothing that Mutis imposed on me in the booming English accent he invented to amuse the salesclerks. We had lunch with Gonzalo Mallarino and other young writers who had been invited so that I could be presented to society. I heard nothing further from Guillermo Cano until three days later, when he called
while I was in Mutis’s office.

“Listen, Gabo, what happened to you?” he said with a poor imitation of the severity of a publisher. “Yesterday we went to press late waiting for your article.”

I went down to the newsroom to talk to him, and I still do not know how I continued writing unsigned editorials every afternoon for more than a week without anybody talking to me about a job or a salary.
In our conversations during breaks the reporters treated me as if I were one of them, and in fact I was without imagining to what extent.

The section “Day by Day” was never signed, and as a rule Guillermo Cano led off with a political editorial. In an order established by management, next came a piece on any subject by Gonzalo González, who also wrote the most intelligent and popular section
in the paper—“Questions and Answers”—where he dispensed with readers’ doubts under the pseudonym Gog, not on account of Giovanni Papini but because of his own name. After that they published my editorials, and on very rare
occasions something special by Eduardo Zalamea, who occupied the best space every day on the editorial page—“The City and the World”—using the pseudonym Ulises, not Homer’s—as
he would always explain—but James Joyce’s.

Álvaro Mutis had to make a business trip to Port-au-Prince early in the new year, and he invited me to go with him. Haiti became the country of my dreams after I read Alejo Carpentier’s
The Kingdom of This World.
I still had not given him my answer on February 18, when I wrote a piece about the queen mother of England lost in the solitude of an immense
Buckingham Palace. It surprised me that it was published in the lead position of “Day by Day” and had been well received in our offices. That night, at a small gathering at the house of José Salgar, the editor-in-chief, Eduardo Zalamea’s comments were even more enthusiastic. Some benevolent traitor later told me that this opinion had dissipated any remaining reluctance on the part of management
to make me a formal offer of a permanent job.

Very early the next day Álvaro Mutis called me to his office to give me the sad news that the trip to Haiti had been canceled. What he did not tell me was that this had been decided after a casual conversation with Guillermo Cano, who had asked in all sincerity that he not take me to Port-au-Prince. Álvaro, who did not know Haiti either, wanted to
know why. “Well, when you see it,” Guillermo told him, “you’ll understand that it’s the place Gabo may like most in the world.” And he put the finishing touch on the afternoon with a masterful bullfighter’s pass:

“If Gabo goes to Haiti he’ll never come back.”

Álvaro understood, canceled the trip, and made it seem a decision by his company. And so I never visited Port-au-Prince, but I did not
know the real reasons until a few years ago, when Álvaro told them to me in yet another of our endless evocations worthy of grandfathers. Guillermo, for his part, once he had me tied down with a contract at the paper, repeated to me for years that I should think about a great feature article on Haiti, but I never could go and I never told him why.

The thought of being a staff reporter for
El
Espectador
had
never crossed my mind. I understood that they would publish my stories because of the scarcity and poor quality of the genre in Colombia, but writing every day for an evening paper was quite a different challenge for someone with little experience in hard-hitting journalism. Half a century old, brought up in a rented house on surplus machines from
El Tiempo
—a rich, powerful, and
influential paper—
El Espectador
was a modest evening newspaper of sixteen crowded pages, but its five thousand copies, counted in a lax way, were snatched from the newsboys almost at the doors of the printing plant and read in half an hour in the taciturn cafés of the old city. Eduardo Zalamea Borda had stated on the BBC in London that it was the best newspaper in the world. What was most compelling
was not the statement itself, but the fact that almost everyone who worked on the paper, and many of those who read it, were convinced that this was true.

I must confess that my heart skipped a beat on the day following the cancellation of the trip to Haiti, when Luis Gabriel Cano, the general manager, made an appointment with me in his office. The interview, with all its formality, lasted less
than five minutes. Luis Gabriel had a reputation for being a gruff man, generous as a friend and the kind of miser a good manager should be, but then, and always, he seemed to me very concrete and cordial. His proposal in solemn terms was that I stay on the paper as a staff reporter to write articles on general topics, as well as opinion pieces and whatever else might be needed in the tribulations
of the last minute, at a salary of nine hundred pesos a month. I could not breathe. When I recovered I asked him again how much, and he repeated it for me, letter by letter: nine hundred. This made so great an impression on me that some months later, talking about it at a party, my dear Luis Gabriel revealed to me that he had interpreted my surprise as an expression of rejection. Don Gabriel had
expressed the final doubt, based on a well-founded fear: “He’s so skinny and pale, he might die in the office.” This was how I became a staff reporter at
El Espectador,
where I used the greatest amount of paper in my life in less than two years.

It was a fortunate coincidence. The most frightening institution
at the paper was Don Gabriel Cano, the patriarch, who by his own decision established
himself as the implacable inquisitor of the newsroom. With his millimetric magnifying glass he would read even the most unexpected comma in the daily edition, mark in red the mistakes in each article, and display on a bulletin board the clippings punished by his devastating comments. The bulletin board was known from the first day as the “Wall of Infamy,” and I do not recall a single reporter who
escaped his bloodthirsty pen.

The spectacular advancement of Guillermo Cano to publisher of
El Espectador
at the age of twenty-three did not seem to be the early fruit of his personal merits but the fulfillment of a destiny written before he was born. For that reason my first surprise was learning that he really was the publisher, when many of us on the outside thought he was no more than an
obedient son. What struck me most was the speed with which he could recognize what was news.

At times he had to confront everyone, even without many arguments, until he succeeded in convincing them of the truth. It was a time when the profession was not taught at universities but learned on the job, breathing in the printer’s ink, and
El Espectador
had the best teachers, with good hearts but
firm hands. Guillermo Cano had begun there as soon as he could write, with articles on the bulls so severe and erudite that his principal calling did not seem to be journalism but bullfighting. And so the most difficult experience of his life must have been seeing himself advanced from one day to the next, with no intermediate steps, from beginning student to senior teacher. No one who did not know
him well could have imagined the awful determination of his character behind a gentle and somewhat evasive manner. He engaged in vast and dangerous battles with the same passion, not ever stopping when faced with the certainty that behind even the most noble causes death could be lying in ambush.

I have never known anyone more unwilling to engage in public life, more reluctant to accept personal
honors, more disdainful of the blandishments of power. He was a man with few friends, but those few were very close, and I felt that I was one
of them from the first day. Perhaps the fact that I was one of the youngest in a newsroom of battle-scarred veterans contributed to this, for it created between the two of us a sense of complicity that never weakened. What was exemplary about that friendship
was its ability to prevail over opposing opinions. Our political disagreements were very deep and became even deeper as the world around us fell apart, but we always knew how to find a common ground where we could continue fighting together for the causes we thought were just.

The newsroom was enormous, with desks on both sides, and an atmosphere dominated by good humor and crude jokes. There
was Darío Bautista, a strange kind of counterminister of finance, who from first cockcrow devoted himself to making the dawn bitter for the highest functionaries, with cabalistic divinations of a sinister future that were almost always correct. There was the legal reporter, Felipe González Toledo, a born journalist who often was far ahead of any official investigation in the art of stopping an injustice
and solving a crime. Guillermo Lanao, who took care of several ministries, preserved the secret of being a child until his tenderest old age. Rogelio Echaverría, one of the great poets, was responsible for the morning edition and we never saw him in the light of day. My cousin Gonzalo González, his leg in a cast because of a soccer injury, had to study in order to answer questions about anything,
and in the end he became a specialist in anything. In spite of having been a front-rank soccer player at the university, he had endless faith in theoretical study over and above experience. He gave us a stellar demonstration of this in the reporters’ bowling championship, when he devoted himself to studying the physical laws of the game in a manual instead of practicing until dawn at the alleys,
like the rest of us, and he was that year’s champion.