Living to Tell the Tale (64 page)

Álvaro Mutis, in the intervals he had free between his trips around the world, completed in more lofty style my admission into the cultural community. In his capacity as head of public relations for Esso Colombiana, he organized lunches in the most expensive restaurants with people who in reality were valuable and influential in arts and letters, and he often had guests
from other cities in the country. The poet Jorge Gaitán Durán, obsessed with creating a great literary magazine that cost a fortune, solved the problem in part with funds from Álvaro Mutis for the promotion of culture. Álvaro Castaño Castillo and his wife, Gloria Valencia, had been trying for years to found a radio station devoted in its entirety to keeping good music and cultural programs within
reach. We all kidded them on account of the unreality of their project, except Álvaro Mutis, who did all he could to help them. And so they established the station HJCK, “The world in Bogotá,” with a transmitter of five hundred watts, the minimum at the time.
Television did not yet exist in Colombia, but Gloria Valencia invented the metaphysical wonder of broadcasting a fashion show on the radio.

The only repose I permitted myself in those heady times were slow Sunday afternoons in the house of Álvaro Mutis, who taught me to listen to music without prejudices of class. We would lie on the rug listening with our hearts, and with no learned speculations, to the great masters. It was the origin of a passion that had begun in the obscure little room at the Biblioteca Nacional and never forgot
us again. Today I have listened to as much music as I have been able to obtain, above all romantic chamber music, which I consider the pinnacle of all arts. In Mexico, while I was writing
One Hundred Years of Solitude
—between 1965 and 1966—I had only two records, which wore out because they were played so often: the Preludes of Debussy and the Beatles’
Hard Day’s Night.
Later, in Barcelona, when
at last I had almost as many as I had always wanted, alphabetical classification seemed too conventional, and I adopted for my own convenience an instrumental order: the cello, which is my favorite, from Vivaldi to Brahms; the violin, from Corelli to Schoenberg; the clavichord and the piano, from Bach to Bartók. Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the
dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.

My limitation was that I could not write to music because I paid more attention to what I was hearing than to what I was writing, and even today I attend very few concerts because I feel that in my seat a somewhat prurient intimacy is established with strangers sitting near me. But
with time and the possibilities of having good music at home, I learned to write with a musical background in harmony with what I am writing. Chopin’s nocturnes for quiet episodes, or sextets by Brahms for happy afternoons. On the other hand, for years I did not listen to Mozart after I was assaulted by the perverse idea that Mozart does not exist, because when he is good he is Beethoven and when
he is bad he is Haydn.

During the years in which I have evoked these memories, I achieved the miracle, and no kind of music interferes with my writing, though perhaps I am not aware of other virtues, for the greatest surprise was given to me by two very young and diligent Catalan musicians who believed they had discovered surprising affinities between my sixth novel,
The Autumn of the Patriarch,
and Béla Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3. It is true that I listened to it without respite while I was writing the book, because it created a very special and somewhat unusual state of mind in me, but I never thought it could have influenced me to the point where it would be noticed in my writing. I do not know how the members of the Swedish Academy discovered that weakness when they played it as
background to the awarding of my prize. I was grateful in a most profound way for that, of course, but if they had asked me—with all my gratitude and respect for them and for Béla Bartók—I would have preferred one of Francisco el Hombre’s spontaneous
romanzas
from the fiestas of my childhood.

In those years there was no cultural project, no book to be written or picture to be painted in Colombia,
that did not pass first through Mutis’s office. I was witness to his dialogue with a young painter who had everything ready for his obligatory journey to Europe but did not have the money for the trip. Álvaro had not even heard his entire story when he took the magic carpet out of his desk.

“Here’s your passage,” he said.

I was dazzled by the naturalness with which he performed these miracles
without the slightest display of power. For this reason I still ask myself if he did not have something to do with the request made to me at a cocktail party by Oscar Delgado, the secretary of the Asociación Colombiana de Escritores y Artistas, that I participate in the national short-story contest that was about to be declared void. He said it in so unpleasant a way that the proposition seemed
indecorous, but someone who overheard explained to me that in a country like ours, one could not be a writer without knowing that literary competitions are simple social pantomimes. “Even the Nobel Prize,”
he concluded without the slightest malice, and without even thinking about it he put me on my guard for another extraordinary decision that waylaid me twenty-seven years later.

The jury for
the short-story competition was composed of Hernando Téllez, Juan Lozano y Lozano, Pedro Gómez Valderrama, and another three writers and critics from the big leagues. And so I made no ethical or economic determinations but spent the night in a final revision of “One Day After Saturday,” the story I had written in Barranquilla in a burst of inspiration in the offices of
El Nacional.
After it had
been lying in a drawer for more than a year, I thought it might stir a good jury. It did, and there was an extraordinary prize of three thousand pesos.

At this same time, and without any relation to the contest, Don Samuel Lisman Baum, the cultural attaché of the embassy of Israel, dropped into my office, for he had just inaugurated a publishing enterprise with a book of poems by Maestro León
de Greiff:
Fifth Hodgepodge Compendium.
The edition was presentable, and I had heard good reports about Lisman Baum. And so I gave him a very much revised copy of
Leaf Storm
and sent him on his way with the commitment to talk later. Above all about money, which in the end—of course—was the only thing we never talked about. Cecilia Porras painted a new cover—which she was never paid for either—based
on my description of the character of the boy. The graphics workshop at
El Espectador
provided at no charge the plate for the title pages in color.

I knew nothing else until some five months later, when Editorial Sipa of Bogotá—I had never heard of it—called me at the paper to tell me that the edition of four thousand copies was ready for distribution, but they did not know what to do with it
because no one had any word from Lisman Baum. Not even the reporters on the newspaper could find any trace of him, and no one has to this day. Ulises suggested that they sell the copies to bookstores on the basis of a press campaign that he himself initiated with a note that I still have not finished thanking him for. The critical reception was excellent, but most of the edition remained in the warehouse,
it never was
established how many copies were sold, and I did not receive a
céntimo
of royalties from anyone.

Four years later Eduardo Caballero Calderón, who published the Biblioteca Básica de Cultura Colombiana, included a pocket edition of
Leaf Storm
in a collection of works that were sold at newsstands in Bogotá and other cities. He paid the contracted rights, meager but on time, which had
for me the sentimental value of being the first I had received for a book. The edition had some changes that I did not identify as mine, and I did not concern myself with not including them in subsequent editions. Almost thirteen years later, when I passed through Colombia after the launching of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
in Buenos Aires, I found on the newsstands in Bogotá numerous remaindered
copies of the first edition of
Leaf Storm
selling for a peso each. I bought all I could carry. Since then I have found in Latin American bookstores other scattered leftovers, which they were trying to sell as historic books. About two years ago an English dealer in old books sold a copy of the first edition of
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
signed by me, for three thousand dollars.

None of those
incidents distracted me for an instant from the grinding of my journalist’s mill. The initial success of the serialized articles obliged us to find fodder to feed an insatiable beast. The daily tension was untenable, not only in identifying and searching for topics but in the writing, which always was threatened by the charms of fiction. At
El Espectador
there was no doubt: the invariable raw
material of the profession was the truth and nothing but the truth, and that kept us in a state of unendurable tension. José Salgar and I ended up so tormented by this that it did not give us a moment’s peace even on Sundays, our day of rest.

In 1956 it was learned that Pope Pius XII was suffering from an attack of hiccups that could cost him his life. The only antecedent I recall is the masterful
story “P. & O.,” by Somerset Maugham, whose protagonist died in the middle of the Indian Ocean from an attack of hiccups that consumed him in five days, while people from all over the world were sending him every kind of extravagant remedy, but I believe I did not
know the story at the time. On weekends we did not dare go too far in our excursions to the towns on the savanna because the paper
was prepared to publish a special edition in the event of the pope’s death. I was in favor of having the edition ready, with only a few spaces to fill with the first cables of his death. Two years later, when I was a correspondent in Rome, the resolution of the papal hiccups was still being awaited.

Another irresistible problem at the paper was the tendency to concern ourselves only with spectacular
subjects that could bring in more and more readers, and I had the more modest one of not losing sight of another less-well-served public that thought more with its heart. Among the few topics that I managed to find, I have kept the memory of a simple story that caught me on the fly through the window of a bus. At the entrance to a beautiful colonial house at number 567 on Carrera Octava in
Bogotá there was a sign that underrated itself: “Office of Unclaimed Letters of the National Mail Service.” I do not remember at all if I ever lost anything by means of those detours, but I got off the bus and knocked at the door. The man who answered was responsible for the office with its six methodical employees, covered by the rust of routine, whose romantic mission it was to find the addressee
of any letter gone astray.

It was a lovely house, enormous and dusty, with high ceilings and decaying walls, dim corridors and galleries crowded with ownerless papers. An average of one hundred unclaimed letters came in each day, and of these at least ten had the correct postage, but the envelopes were blank and did not even have the name of the sender. The employees in the office knew them as
“letters for the invisible man,” and they spared no effort to deliver or return them. But the ceremony for opening them to search for clues had a bureaucratic rigor that was somewhat useless, but praiseworthy.

The article, in just one installment, was published with the title “The Postman Rings a Thousand Times,” and a subtitle: “The Cemetery of Dead Letters.” When Salgar read it, he said: “You
don’t have to wring this swan’s neck because it was born
dead.” He published it, with the correct spread, no more and no less, but you could see in his expression that he was as grief-stricken as I by the bitterness of what might have been. Rogelio Echaverría, perhaps because he was a poet, celebrated it in a good-humored way but with a remark I never forgot: “It’s just that Gabo will clutch at
any straw.”

I felt so demoralized that on my own account—and without telling Salgar about it—I decided to find the addressee of a letter that had drawn my special attention. It was postmarked at the Agua de Dios Leprosarium and addressed to “The lady in mourning who goes to five o’clock Mass every day at the Church of Las Aguas.” After making all kinds of useless inquiries of the parish priest
and his assistants, I continued interviewing the parishioners at five o’clock Mass for several weeks, with no result. It surprised me that the most faithful were three very old women, always dressed in strict mourning, but none of them had anything to do with the Agua de Dios Leprosarium. It was a failure that took me a long time to recover from, not only because of self-love or the desire to perform
an act of charity, but because I was convinced that behind the actual story of the woman in mourning lay another impassioned story.

As I was foundering in the swamps of writing feature articles, my relationship with the Barranquilla Group was becoming more intense. Their trips to Bogotá were not frequent, but I assaulted them by phone at any hour and in any difficulty, above all Germán Vargas,
because he had a pedagogical concept of reporting. I consulted them about every problem, and there were many, or they called me when there were reasons to congratulate me. I always thought of Álvaro Cepeda as a classmate in the seat next to mine. After the cordial two-way mockery that was mandatory within the group, he got me out of the swamp with a simplicity that never failed to amaze me. On the
other hand, my consultations with Alfonso Fuenmayor were more literary. He had the knowledgeable magic to save me from difficulties with examples from great authors, or to dictate to me the saving citation drawn from his bottomless arsenal. His greatest joke was when I asked him for a title for an
editorial about street vendors of food who were being hounded by authorities from the Health Department.
Alfonso gave me an immediate reply:

“The man who sells food does not die of hunger.”