It might have been a sad fate, but César Carballo did not have time to think about it. He made sure not to feel sorry for himself, as well. When he could close the workshop at five instead of six, he would go to one of the cafés on Avenida Jiménez and read the papers and listen to the law and med school students talk about politics as if nothing else existed in the world. In those moments he felt alive. He spent all day in the workshop, but one of the few advantages of not being twenty yet was a blameless bachelorhood. Nobody was waiting for César anywhere, no woman complained of his absences or the smell of cigarettes or the few too many beers he’d allow himself two or three times a month, if things were going well. In the cafés he’d grab the waitresses and get slapped for it, and he could sit for hours behind the domino players and watch their matches, as long as he was careful not to bump the table and knock over their pieces, and he saw famous writers from afar in El Molino and found out that the figures on the wall were those of the characters from Don Quixote and heard the famous writers talk about Don Quixote with wide-eyed students and realized none of that interested him. Not that Don Quixote didn’t interest him: made-up stories didn’t interest him. Nor was he interested in the poetry he heard from the bohemian tables of the Café Automático, under the caricature someone had done of the poet León de Greiff, although he came to recognize words from hearing them so often, and occasionally, trying to get a girl to go to bed with him, he would come out with some lines he’d go on reciting all his life.
This rose was witness
To this, which if not love,
No other love could be.
This rose was witness
When you gave yourself to me!
No: the only thing that interested him was politics. As the months went by he started taking his friends from the neighborhood on these excursions, and sometimes they would get together with older men, tradesmen in their thirties or forties (mechanics, bricklayers, carpenters), who went to the more working-class cafés to take, they said, the country’s temperature.
And that’s how César Carballo began to find out that the country had a fever. The war in Europe was arriving in Colombia: it wasn’t so much because the price of coffee was lower than it had ever been, or the shortage of building materials that was sweeping away the construction business and the builders with it, but also that the Conservatives were talking about the triumph of fascism and complaining that, by backing the United States, the Liberal government had forced them to bet on the losing horse. They all believed that Germany was going to win the war and that would be good for the country: because they were all Franco supporters, by conviction or contagion, and the Axis victory would also be Franco’s victory, and Franco’s victory would also be the victory of the right wing of the Conservative Party. For César Carballo and his comrades from La Perseverancia, these Conservatives were the enemy. They had to fight against them: because the triumph of the Conservative Party in Colombia would be not just a return to the dark days of the past, but the invasion of European fascism.
But then, like a bad rumor, a series of new ideas began running through the poor neighborhoods of Bogotá. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was traveling the country giving speeches that the paper wasn’t reporting on, but were transmitted by word of mouth like a secret gospel. In them he was saying strange things like that hunger was neither conservative nor liberal, and neither was malaria; that there was a national country, that of the people, and a political country, that of the ruling class; and that the common enemy of all of them, the architect of the injustices and disasters overwhelming Colombian workers, was a two-headed serpent: one head was called the oligarchy and the other was imperialism. In February 1944, when Gaitán gathered his most fervent supporters at the Bar Cecilia and officially launched his political campaign for the ’46 presidential election, César Carballo and his comrades from La Perseverancia were there, in the front row, drinking in their leader’s words and promising they’d do whatever needed to be done, they’d even give their lives if necessary, so that Gaitán would become the president of Colombia.
The week began to revolve around the Cultural Fridays. These were the speeches Gaitán gave in the Municipal Theater: he would stand, with nowhere to rest his empty hands, in front of a square microphone that broadcast his words over the radio, and raise his fist and fill the place with an electricity nobody had ever felt before. César Carballo lived for those speeches; every moment he didn’t spend in his cobbler’s workshop, or training the neighbor’s son who had started to work for him, Carballo was thinking about what Gaitán had said at the Municipal Theater the previous Friday and anticipating what he’d say on the next.
And when the day arrived, he’d leave on foot at three in the afternoon, to make sure he got in, and stand in line for the four hours until the doors opened. It was time he could ill afford to be away from his obligations at the workshop, and his mother began to complain. “I know you’re going to see the chief, son,” she said. “I know it’s important. But I don’t know why you have to leave so early like this, dropping everything, as if this family wasn’t running a business. As if we didn’t have a radio in the house, son. What would your father say if he hadn’t left us?” How could he explain to his mother what he felt in Gaitán’s presence? He couldn’t, so he just told her: “If I don’t go now, I won’t get in, madrecita.” And it was true: the theater filled with the leader’s followers, every seat upstairs and down but also all the spaces in the aisles. The mysterious solidarity that united them was something César would not have exchanged for anything in the world; besides, not getting in meant possibly missing an unrepeatable event, like when the theater’s speakers weren’t working and Gaitán, with a gesture of impatience and irritation, thrust the microphone out of his way, took a deep breath, and belted out a forty-minute speech at the top of his lungs, with the naked force of his supernatural throat and such clear diction that even the poor souls in the very last row at the back of the balcony caught each and every one of his words.
What happened after the Municipal speeches was just as important. After the moment of magic ended, they’d all meet on the overflowing sidewalks of the Carrera Séptima, and the comrades from La Perseverancia would go to one of the downtown cafés to talk about what they’d just heard. They couldn’t all go, of course, because many of them had to be at work at first light; and many others weren’t all that interested in politics. But Carballo was always there, walking the nocturnal streets in the now biting cold, surrounded by young men like himself, in whose company he felt invulnerable. The police didn’t do anything to them, because in those days almost all the officers were Liberals and many of them clandestine Gaitanistas, but sometimes they’d exchange a couple of words with a haughty Conservative, and in moments like those Carballo believed himself capable of rare bravery. Then they’d burst into a café or a chicha bar as if they were taking over the place, and everybody knew that attitude wouldn’t have been possible before Gaitán: their leader had given them this new pride, and thanks to him they felt that this city, for which they’d worked for generations, belonged to them as well. There, during those long nights of beer and aguardiente in El Inca or El Gato Negro or the Bar Cecilia or the Colombia, it seemed for hours as if it were true, or they seemed to be living in a parallel and phantasmagorical city owned by all of them. In those moments César Carballo received a true sentimental education. Now that I’m trying to reconstruct those days, I cannot belittle what went on in those covens that I’ll call tertulias because that’s what their members called them.
There were chaotic discussions that might finish at two or three in the morning, with shouts and tables knocked over by clumsy drunks. In those days, the Gaitanistas began to organize themselves better: the city was divided into neighborhoods and the neighborhoods into zones and the zones into committees. The café and chicha bar tertulias, that started off with people from the La Perseverancia committee, would be joined as the night went on by people f
rom other committees, almost always from bordering neighborhoods but sometimes from farther away: men of all ages for whom, just as for Carballo, the Cultural Fridays didn’t end when the jefe stepped away from the microphone and drove away from the Municipal Theater in his classy car. But sometimes some stray bohemians would show up as well, poets or novelists or cartoonists, newspaper columnists, chroniclers from the police beat who’d just covered some bloody crime, photographers who accompanied those chroniclers and whose tired eyes had already seen all there was to see as far as mankind’s evil went. And, most of all, there were students, those from the National and those from the Free University or the bourgeois rebels from the Rosario who showed up around midnight after studying law or medicine in other cafés, or after talking about Franco and Mussolini, Stalin and Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler in other tertulias, or after visiting brothels in groups to get insulting discounts in places that already paid starvation wages.
Carballo felt an immediate sympathy toward the students, in spite of their representing all that he had been denied. He saw them arrive, loud and satisfied, bulging with political enthusiasm and confused urges to change the world from their café table (which in those days was the size of the known universe), waving their hands as if possessed and exchanging books between emptied bottles. Most of them were Liberals, because the Gaitanista committees took great care to frequent cafés where others like them predominated, but there were also recently converted communists who arrived with Marxist booklets from the bargain bins of Bogotá bookshops, and even a small group of three or four melancholy anarchists—all dressed in black, all looking like alley cats—who usually occupied a corner table in the Gran Vía and stayed there for hours and hours without talking to anyone else.
Carballo would leave those tertulias with his head bursting with ideas and with documents that seared his hands, and he later wrote down, in the margins of the shoe shop account books, the titles he’d managed to retain. He read voraciously in those days: borrowed books, stolen books, books bought from secondhand stalls. He felt a certain superstitious reverence for them: books had saved Gaitán, and might also save him. He, like Gaitán, had been born into a narrow life, with scant possibilities and mediocre luck. Books—those books he knew and ended up reading in cafés and tertulias, thanks to luckier students—were the escape tunnel.
In the years that followed, Gaitán’s movement was organized with the speed of a conspiracy. La Perseverancia owed much, perhaps unknowingly, to the shoemaker’s son’s enthusiasm; César Carballo was the most active member of their committee. At night, after his mother went to sleep and he’d finished up any overdue jobs, he would go out to put up posters in his neighborhood and others nearby. Sometimes he got into more or less violent arguments with owners of houses who didn’t want Gaitán’s posters on their walls or on the lampposts of their street. César learned to take with him the better-known bandits, thugs, or ex-convicts, so people’s objections disappeared as if by magic. The streets of La Perseverancia got covered with posters on yellowing paper, often written by Carballo, announcing the next speech at the Municipal Theater (“Bring the family,” they commanded) or the chief’s visit to some conservative neighborhood (and the people went with him, just so the locals would know that Gaitán was never defenseless).
The committee received or gave itself a resonant nickname: Los Empolvados, which came from how dust-covered they were when they came down from the mountains into the city, but they later found out that outside their own neighborhood they were known as Reds. The meetings were held in a different house each time; members fought for the honor of receiving the Gaitanistas; in bare, cold kitchens that smelled of butane, a sweat-stained hat would be passed to collect a few coins.
In that time, the Liberal Party was split: on one side, Gabriel Turbay, son of the eternal political class; on the other, Gaitán. In the committee meetings, it was César Carballo who had the idea of walking down Carrera Séptima with construction ladders and fumigation pumps full of formic acid, stopping beneath each post to spray the luxurious cloth banners of the candidate Turbay. The next morning they were rags, and all of Bogotá saw them. The success of the operation was total. César Carballo was not yet twenty-two years old, but he was already one of the most respected men on the committee. He was growing stronger in his neighborhood and Gaitanism was growing stronger all over Colombia. At the same time, under the new mandate of President Ospina, the violence in the countryside was worsening.
The rumors could barely be believed. News of the Conservative police excesses began arriving in Bogotá, of how they were harassing and persecuting Liberals and their families as hadn’t been seen since the war of 1899. One day they heard about a young Liberal who, in the central square of Tunja, had been carved up with machetes for not responding to shouts of Long live the president, and the next day they heard about a group of policemen in Guatavita that had arrived at a Liberal house in the middle of the night, shooting dead seven inhabitants and setting fire to the furniture. An eight-year-old child escaped out the kitchen door: they caught up with him in an overgrown ditch, and chopped off his right hand with a machete and left him there to bleed to death, but the child survived to tell what had happened. Similar victims of similar atrocities told similar stories in every corner of the country. None of that bothered the government too much: they were isolated cases, said their spokesmen, the police was simply responding to provocations. But the Liberals of Bogotá, and in particular Gaitán’s followers, were worried.
Carballo, as far as he was concerned, would have been much more worried had he not been going through an uncertainty of his own just then. One Friday in December, around three in the afternoon, he was closing the shop to go down to the Municipal Theater when he realized that someone was waiting for him. It was Amalita Ricaurte, the daughter of Don Hernán: a respected and much-loved mechanic who had an honorable scar on his right arm from a Conservative machete attack, and in whose workshop, a garage behind the old Panóptico, four committee meetings had been held. Amalita said hello to Carballo without approaching, like a frightened animal, and began to walk beside him without even asking him where he was going. She accompanied him silently for three blocks, and only as they arrived at Carrera Séptima and Twenty-sixth Street did she tell him, in a barely audible voice and looking at the ground, that she was pregnant.
It was the result of a chance encounter, but from that moment on it was a permanent reality. Amalita was a small, slight woman, with very large eyes and very black hair, who was three years older than Carballo and had begun to feel she’d missed the boat. She usually went to the Cultural Friday speeches, less out of enthusiasm than to obey her father’s orders, and that’s how she must have gotten close to Carballo, bit by bit, during the ins and outs of political activism that her father shared with this young man with the strong voice who had already taken on his shoulders the well-being of his whole family.
Years later, recounting the episode to her only son, Amalita would talk about love at first sight without embarrassment, disguising that fleeting and clandestine encounter with grand words like inevitable or destiny, in such a way that it is not possible to really know how things happened: it’s only possible to know how the only woman who can speak of them wanted to remember them. However it was, at the beginning of 1947 Amalita was already living in César Carballo’s room, throwing up in the mornings in the Carballos’ bathroom, and finding herself in the kitchen of César’s mother, who made her a bland milky soup while glancing at her with a stern, forbidding look on her face, and who had already started accusing her of stealing her son, invading her family, and wanting to take over her dead husband’s business. There was a hasty but happy wedding in a downtown church and a celebration with aguardiente and empanadas. That night, with an empty glass in his hand, Don Hernán Ricaurte hugged his new son-in-law and told him:
“This child is going to be born into a better country. You and me are going to put our shoulders
to the grindstone and my grandson is going to be born in a better country.”
And Amalita, seeing her slightly drunk husband nod, noticed that she believed that too.
The months of her pregnancy were marked by La Perseverancia committee meetings, which turned into the most loyal of the zone, and by the organization of demonstrations and speeches in Bogotá and the surrounding area. The dedication of her father and husband was no less than that of the rest of the members. When Gaitán began to talk of a great torch-lit march, a spectacle that would stop the hearts of the most skeptical, nobody was surprised when La Perseverancia committee got the job or the challenge of organizing it. Amalita was six or seven months along then. And thus, suffering without anyone’s help the rigors of carrying a child in her tired belly, she watched her husband put himself at the head of fund-raising, go house to house asking for coins and passing the hat at committee meetings, and then go around the neighborhood to make sure people would commit to helping to make the torches. César visited local factories to find cheap burlap, visited laundry yards and came back from each one with a broom or mop handle. Carpenters donated legs from broken chairs, and mechanics, recently purchased fuel. Carballo got oil from the railways and donated tacks from his own workshop, and urchins brought him bottle caps from the garbage that he could use to stick the burlap to the wood. In theory, each committee was to supply a certain number of torches, which they’d later sell for two pesos apiece to help fund the movement. César Carballo’s committee not only contributed the most torches, but also made enough so that no Gaitanista would have to fight with another for a bit of fire. Don Hernán Ricaurte gave them a great satisfaction when he embraced his son-in-law in public and declared a banality that was also a medal: “Our boy’s turned out good.” Meanwhile, neither Amalita nor her father nor her husband really wondered why the Gaitanistas were marching. The chief had asked for it, and that was enough.
The Shape of the Ruins Page 45