Living to Tell the Tale

by Gabriel García Márquez

  Examples like these produced a new self-awareness in me, and the Crónica project gave me wings. Our morale was so high that in spite of insurmountable obstacles we even had our own offices on the third floor of a building without an elevator, surrounded by the shouts of the women peddling food, and the lawless buses on Calle San Blas, which was a tumultuous fair from daybreak until seven at night. There was almost no room for us. The telephone had not yet been installed, and an air conditioner was a fantasy that could cost us more than publishing the weekly, but Fuenmayor had already had time to fill the office with his ragged encyclopedias, his press cuttings in any language, and his celebrated manuals of strange trades. On his publisher’s desk was the historic Underwood he had rescued at grave risk to his own life from a burning embassy, which today is a jewel in the Museo Romántico in Barranquilla. I occupied the only other desk, with a typewriter lent to us by El Heraldo, in my brand-new capacity as editor-in-chief. There was a drawing table for Alejandro Obregón, Orlando Guerra, and Alfonso Melo, three famous painters who had agreed in their right minds to illustrate the contributions, and they did, at first because of their congenital generosity, and in the end because we did not have a céntimo to spare even for ourselves. The dedicated and self-sacrificing photographer was Quique Scopell.

  Aside from the editorial work that corresponded to my title, it was also my job to supervise the typesetting and help the proofreader in spite of my Dutchman’s spelling. Since my commitment to El Heraldo to continue “La Jirafa” was still in effect, I did not have much time for regular contributions to Crónica. I did, however, have time to write my stories in the idle small hours of the morning.

  Alfonso, a specialist in every genre, placed the weight of his faith in detective stories, for which he had a burning passion. He translated or selected them, and I subjected them to a process of formal simplification that would help me in my own work. It consisted of saving space through the elimination not only of useless words but also of superfluous actions, until the stories were reduced to their pure essence without affecting their ability to convince. That is, deleting everything unnecessary in a forceful genre in which each word ought to be responsible for the entire structure. This was one of the most useful exercises in my oblique research into learning the technique for telling a story.

  Some of the best ones by José Félix Fuenmayor saved us on several Saturdays, but circulation was immovable. The perpetual life raft, however, was the temperament of Alfonso Fuenmayor, who had never been recognized for his talents as a man of business, and with a tenacity superior to his strength he persisted in ours, which he himself tried to wreck at every step with his terrible sense of humor. He did everything, writing the most lucid editorials or the most trivial notes with the same perseverance he brought to obtaining advertisements, unthinkable amounts of credit, and exclusive pieces from difficult contributors. But they were sterile miracles. When the newsboys came back with the same number of copies they had taken out to sell, we attempted personal distribution in our favorite taverns, from El Tercer Hombre to the taciturn bars in the river port, where we had to collect our scant profits in ethylic kind.

  One of the most reliable contributors, and no doubt the one who was read the most, turned out to be El Vate Osío. Beginning with the first issue of Crónica he was unfailing, and in his “Diary of a Typist,” written under the pseudonym Dolly Melo, he succeeded in conquering readers’ hearts. No one could believe that so many different kinds of jobs were performed with so much flair by the same man.

  Bob Prieto could prevent the shipwreck of Crónica with some medical or artistic find from the Middle Ages. But in questions of work he had a transparent standard: if you do not pay there is no product. Very soon, of course, and with sorrow in our hearts, there was none.

  We managed to publish four enigmatic stories by Julio Mario Santodomingo, written in English, which Alfonso translated with the eagerness of a dragonfly hunter in the foliage of his strange dictionaries, and Alejandro Obregón illustrated with the refinement of a great artist. But Julio Mario traveled so much, and with so many contrary destinations, that he became an invisible partner. Only Alfonso Fuenmayor knew where to find him, and he revealed it to us in an unsettling phrase:

  “Every time I see a plane fly over I think Julio Mario Santodomingo is on it.”

  The rest were occasional contributors who in the last minutes before going to press—or before payment—kept us in suspense.

  Bogotá approached us as equals, but none of those useful friends made any kind of effort to keep the weekly afloat. Except Jorge Zalamea, who understood the affinities between his magazine and ours and proposed an agreement for exchanging material, which had good results. But I believe that in reality no one appreciated what Crónica already had of the miraculous. The editorial board consisted of sixteen members chosen by us according to each one’s recognized merits, and all of them were flesh-and-blood creatures but so powerful and busy that it was easy to doubt their existence.

  For me, Crónica had the lateral importance of obliging me to improvise emergency stories to fill unexpected spaces in the anguish of going to press. I would sit at the typewriters while linotypists and typesetters did their work, and out of nothing I would invent a tale the size of the space. This was how I wrote “How Natanael Pays a Visit,” which solved an urgent problem for me at dawn, and “A Blue Dog’s Eyes” five weeks later.

  The first of these two stories was the origin of a series with the same character, whose name I took without permission from André Gide. Later I wrote “The End of Natanael” in order to resolve another last-minute drama. Both formed part of a sequence of six, which I filed away without sorrow when I realized they had nothing to do with me. Of those I remember in part, I recall one but do not have the slightest idea of its plot: “How Natanael Dresses Like a Bride.” Today the character does not resemble anyone I have known, and it was not based on my own or other people’s experiences, and I cannot even imagine how it could be a story of mine with so equivocal a subject. No question, then, that Natanael was a literary risk with no human interest. It is good to remember these disasters in order not to forget that a character is not invented from zero, as I tried to do with Natanael. It was my good luck that I did not have enough imagination to go too far away from myself, and my bad luck that I was also convinced that literary work had to be paid as well as laying bricks, and if we paid typographers good salaries, and on time, with even more reason we had to pay writers.

  The greatest resonance we had from our work on Crónica came to us in Don Ramón’s letters to Germán Vargas. He was interested in the most unexpected news, and in events and his friends in Colombia, and Germán would send him newspaper clippings and tell him in endless letters the news prohibited by the censors. That is, for him there were two Crónicas: the one we produced and the one Germán summarized for him on weekends. Our most rapacious desire was for Don Ramón’s enthusiastic or harsh comments on our articles.

  People proposed several causes to explain Crónica’s difficulties, and even the uncertainties of the group, and I found out by accident that some attributed these to my congenital and contagious bad luck. As lethal proof they would cite my article on Berascochea, the Brazilian soccer player, with which we had wanted to reconcile sport and literature in a new genre, and which was a categorical disaster. When I learned about my infamous reputation it was already widespread among the patrons at Japy. Demoralized down to the marrow of my bones, I mentioned it to Germán Vargas, who already knew about it, as did the rest of the group.

  “Take it easy, Maestro,” he said without the slightest doubt. “Writing the way you write can be explained only by a kind of good luck that no one can defeat.”

  Not all nights were bad. July 27, 1950, in the sporting house of La Negra Eufemia, had a certain historical value in my life as a writer. I do not know for what good reason the madam had ordered an epic stew with four kinds of meat, and the curlews, excited by the untamed aromas, shrieked
without restraint around the fire. A frenetic patron grabbed a curlew by the neck and threw it alive into the boiling pot. The animal just managed a howl of pain and a final flap of its wings, and then it sank into the depths of hell. The savage killer tried to grab another one, but La Negra Eufemia had already risen from her throne with all her power.

  “Be still, damn it,” she shouted, “or the curlews will peck out your eyes!”

  It mattered only to me, because I was the only one who did not have the heart to taste the sacrilegious stew. Instead of going to sleep, I hurried to the Crónica office and wrote in a single sitting the story about three patrons in a bordello whose eyes were pecked out by curlews and nobody believed it. It had only four office-size pages, double spaced, and it was told in the first person plural by a nameless voice. Its realism is evident and yet it is the most enigmatic of my stories, and it also turned me onto a path I was about to abandon because I could not follow it. I had begun writing at four in the morning on Friday and finished at eight, tormented by a prophet’s blinding light. With the infallible complicity of Porfirio Mendoza, the historic typesetter at El Heraldo, I altered the layout for the edition of Crónica that would circulate the next day. At the last minute, desperate because of the guillotine of going to press, I dictated to Porfirio the definitive title I had found at last, and he wrote it straight into molten lead: “The Night of the Curlews.”

  For me it was the beginning of a new era, after nine stories that were still in metaphysical limbo and when I had no plans to continue with a genre I could not manage to grasp. The following month, Jorge Zalamea reproduced it in Crítica, an excellent journal of important poetry. I reread it fifty years later, before I wrote this paragraph, and I believe I would not change even a comma. In the midst of the disorder without a compass in which I was living, that was the beginning of spring.

  The country, on the other hand, was going into a tailspin. Laureano Gómez had returned from New York to be proclaimed the Conservative candidate for the presidency of the Republic. Liberalism abstained in the face of the empire of violence, and Gómez was elected as the lone candidate on August 7, 1950. Since Congress was in adjournment, he took office before the Supreme Court.

  He almost had no chance to govern in person, for after fifteen months he retired from the presidency for real reasons of health. He was replaced by the Conservative jurist and parliamentarian Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez, in his capacity as first deputy of the Republic. Shrewd observers interpreted this as a formula, very typical of Laureano Gómez, to leave power in other hands but not lose it, and to continue governing from his house by means of an intermediary. And in urgent cases, by means of the telephone.

  I think that the return of Álvaro Cepeda with his degree from Columbia University a month before the sacrifice of the curlew was decisive for enduring the grim prospects of those days. He came back with more disheveled hair and without his brush mustache, and wilder than when he left. Germán Vargas and I, who had been expecting him for several months fearful that he had been tamed in New York, died laughing when we saw him leave the plane in a jacket and tie, waving at us from the steps with Hemingway’s latest: Across the River and into the Trees. I tore it out of his hands, caressed it on both sides, and when I tried to ask him something, Álvaro anticipated me:

  “It’s a piece of shit!”

  Germán Vargas, weak with laughter, whispered into my ear: “He’s just the same.” But Álvaro clarified for us later that his opinion of the book was a joke, because he had just started to read it on the flight from Miami. In any case, what raised our spirits was that he brought back with him, more virulent than ever, the measles rash of journalism, movies, and literature. In the months that followed, as he reacclimated, he kept our fever at 104 degrees.

  The contagion was immediate. “La Jirafa,” which for months had been circling around itself tapping a blind man’s stick, began to breathe with two fragments plundered from the rough draft of La casa. One was “The Colonel’s Son,” never born, and the other was “Ny,” a fugitive girl at whose door I knocked very often looking for different paths, and she never answered. I also recovered my adult interest in comic strips, not as a Sunday pastime but as a new literary genre condemned without reason to the nursery. My hero, one of many, was Dick Tracy. And, of course, I also recovered the cult of the movies that my grandfather had inculcated in me, that had been nourished by Don Antonio Daconte in Aracataca, and that Álvaro Cepeda converted into an evangelical passion for a country where the best movies were known through the tales of pilgrims. It was fortunate that his return coincided with the opening of two masterpieces: Intruder in the Dust, directed by Clarence Brown and based on the novel by William Faulkner, and Portrait of Jenny, directed by William Dieterle and based on the novel by Robert Nathan. I commented on both of them in “La Jirafa” after long discussions with Álvaro Cepeda. I became so interested that I began to look at films with a different eye. Before I knew him I did not realize that the most important thing was the name of the director, which is the last one that appears in the credits. For me it was a simple question of writing scripts and managing actors, since the rest was done by the countless members of the crew. When Álvaro returned he gave me a complete course based on shouts and white rum until dawn at tables in the worst taverns, in order to teach me by force what they had taught him about movies in the United States, and we would stay up all night with the waking dream of doing the same thing in Colombia.

  Aside from those luminous explosions, the impression of the friends who followed Álvaro at his cruising speed was that he did not have the serenity to sit down to write. Those of us who lived close to him could not conceive of him sitting for more than an hour at any desk. But two or three months after his return, Tita Manotas—his sweetheart of many years and his lifelong wife—called us in terror to say that Álvaro had sold his historic station wagon and left behind in the glove compartment the originals, that had no copies, of his unpublished stories. He made no effort to find them, using an argument typical of him that they were “six or seven pieces of shit.” Those of us who were his friends and correspondents helped Tita in her search for the station wagon, which had been sold several more times, all along the Caribbean coast and inland as far as Medellín. At last we found it in a shop in Sincelejo, some two hundred kilometers away. We entrusted the originals, on ragged and incomplete strips of newsprint, to Tita, for fear Álvaro would misplace them again through negligence or on purpose.

  Two of those stories were published in Crónica, and Germán Vargas kept the rest for some two years until a publishing solution was found. The painter Cecilia Porras, always faithful to the group, illustrated them with inspired drawings that were an X ray of Álvaro dressed as everything he could be at the same time: truck driver, carnival clown, mad poet, Columbia student, or any other occupation except being a common, ordinary man. The book was published by Librería Mundo with the title We Were All Waiting, and it was a publishing event that went unnoticed only by academic critics. For me—and this is what I wrote at the time—it was the best book of stories that had been published in Colombia.

  Alfonso Fuenmayor, for his part, wrote comments as a critic and teacher of letters in newspapers and magazines, but he was very shy about collecting them in books. He was a reader of extraordinary voracity, comparable perhaps to that of Álvaro Mutis or Eduardo Zalamea. Germán Vargas and he were powerful critics, more so with their own stories than with those of others, but their mania for finding youthful values never failed them. That was the creative spring when the insistent rumor circulated that Germán was staying up all night writing masterful stories, but nothing was known about them until many years later when he locked himself in his bedroom in his father’s house and burned them just hours before marrying my comadre Susana Linares, so that he could be certain they would not be read, not even by her. It was assumed that they were stories and essays, perhaps the first draft of a novel, but Germán never said a word about them either before or
after, and only on the eve of his wedding did he take drastic precautions so that no one, including the woman who would be his wife the next day, would ever find out. Susana knew what he was doing but did not go into the room to stop him because her mother-in-law would not have permitted it. “In those days,” Susi told me years later with her trenchant humor, “a girl could not go into her fiancé’s bedroom before they were married.”

  Less than a year had gone by when the letters from Don Ramón began to be less explicit and more and more melancholy and sketchy. I went into the Librería Mundo on May 7, 1952, at twelve noon, and Germán did not have to say anything for me to know that Don Ramón had died, two days earlier, in the Barcelona of his dreams. The only comment, as we walked to the midday café, was the same for everyone:

  “I can’t believe it!”

  I was not conscious at the time that this was a different kind of year in my life, but today I have no doubt that it was decisive. Until then I had been content with my dissolute appearance. I was loved and respected by many, and admired by some, in a city where people lived in their own way and manner. I had an intense social life, I took part in artistic and social debates wearing my pilgrim’s sandals that looked as if they had been bought to imitate Álvaro Cepeda, with one pair of linen trousers and two twill shirts that I washed in the shower.

  From one day to the next, for a variety of reasons—some of them too frivolous—I began to improve my clothing, cut my hair like a recruit, trimmed my mustache, and learned to wear a pair of senator’s shoes given to me unworn by Dr. Rafael Marriaga, an itinerant member of the group and a historian of the city, because they were too big for him. Through the unconscious dynamic of social climbing, I began to feel that I was suffocating from the heat in the room at The Skyscraper, as if Aracataca had been in Siberia, and to suffer on account of transient guests who spoke in loud voices when they woke up, and to never weary of grumbling because the little birds of the night continued to flood their rooms with entire crews of freshwater sailors.