We needed time to think. We had two soft drinks in silence, each of us lost in his own thoughts, and he recovered his feverish idealism before we finished and left me speechless. “The only thing that consoles me in all of this,” he said with a tremulous sigh, “is my joy that at last you can finish your studies.” I never told him how much I was affected by that illusive happiness for so trivial a reason. I felt an icy gust in my belly, set off by the perverse idea that the family’s exodus was nothing more than a trick of his to oblige me to be a lawyer. I looked straight into his eyes and they were two astonished pools. I realized he was so defenseless and worried that he would not oblige me to do anything, and would not deny me anything, but he had enough faith in his Divine Providence to believe he could make me surrender through sheer exhaustion. Even more: with the same captive spirit he revealed that he had found me a position in Cartagena and had everything ready for me to begin the following Monday. A wonderful position, he explained, and I would only have to show up every two weeks to collect my salary.
It was much more than I could digest. With clenched teeth I put forward a few misgivings to prepare him for my final refusal. I told him about the long conversation with my mother on the trip to Aracataca about which I had never received any comments from him, but I had understood that his indifference toward the subject was the best response. The saddest part was that I was playing with loaded dice, since I knew I would not be accepted into the university because I had failed two subjects in the second year, which I never made up, and another three in the third year that were unsalvageable. I had hidden this from the family to spare them unnecessary grief, and I did not even want to imagine what Papá’s reaction would be if I told him that afternoon. At the beginning of our conversation I had resolved not to give in to any sentimental weakness, because it hurt me that so kind a man had to let himself be seen by his children in such a state of defeat. But it seemed to me that this meant placing too much confidence in life. In the end I surrendered to the easy formula of asking him for a night to think about it.
“Agreed,” he said, “as long as you don’t lose sight of the fact that you hold the fate of the family in your hands.”
The condition was unnecessary. I was so aware of my weakness that when I saw him off on the last bus, at seven in the evening, I had to suborn my heart not to sit in the seat beside him. For me it was clear that we had gone full circle, and the family was so poor again that it could survive only with the assistance of all its members.
It was not a good night for deciding anything. The police had removed by force several families of refugees fleeing the rural violence in the interior who had camped in the Parque San Nicolás. But the peace in Café Roma was impregnable. The Spanish refugees always asked me what I had heard from Don Ramón Vinyes, and I always told them as a joke that his letters did not carry news from Spain but worried questions about the news from Barranquilla. After he died they did not mention him again, but they kept his chair empty at the table. A member of his tertulia congratulated me for the previous day’s “La Jirafa,” which had reminded him somehow of the heartrending romanticism of Mariano José de Larra, and I never knew why. Professor Pérez Domenech saved me from an awkward situation with one of his opportune remarks: “I hope you don’t also follow his bad example and shoot yourself.” I believe he would not have said it if he had known to what extent it might have been true that night.
Half an hour later I led Germán Vargas by the arm to the back of Café Japy. As soon as we had been served I said that I had to have an urgent consultation with him. He froze, the cup halfway to his lips—identical to Don Ramón—and asked in alarm:
“Where are you going?”
His clairvoyance impressed me.
“How the hell do you know!” I said.
He did not know but had foreseen it, and he thought my resignation would be the end of Crónica, a grave lack of responsibility that would weigh on me for the rest of my life. He made it clear that this was little less than treason, and no one had more right than he to tell me so. No one knew what to do with Crónica, but we were all aware that Alfonso had supported it at a crucial moment, including investments beyond his means, so that I could never shake Germán free of the bad idea that my irremediable move was a death sentence for the magazine. I am certain that he, who understood everything, knew that my reasons were inescapable, but he fulfilled his moral duty to tell me what he thought.
The next day, as he was driving me to the Crónica office, Álvaro Cepeda gave a moving demonstration of the turmoil that his friends’ inner storms caused him. No doubt he already knew from Germán about my decision to leave, and his exemplary timidity saved both of us from any salon argument.
“What the hell,” he said. “Going to Cartagena isn’t going anywhere. The fucked-up thing would be if you went to New York, like I had to do, but here I am again, in the flesh.”
It was the kind of parabolic response that helped him in cases like mine to leap past his desire to cry. By the same token I was not surprised that he chose to talk for the first time about the project of making films in Colombia, a conversation that we would continue without results for the rest of our lives. He brought it up in passing as an oblique way of leaving me with some hope, and he stopped short in the midst of the surging crowd and the little shops that sold trinkets on Calle San Blas.
“I already told Alfonso,” he shouted at me through the window, “to hell with the magazine: let’s do one like Time!”
My conversation with Alfonso was not easy for me or him because we had been postponing a clarification for six months, and we both suffered from a kind of mental stammer on difficult occasions. During one of my puerile tantrums in the typesetting room I had removed my name and title from the masthead of Crónica as a metaphor of my formal resignation, and when the storm had passed I forgot to replace them. No one noticed it except Germán Vargas, two weeks later, and he talked about it with Alfonso. It was a surprise for him as well. Porfirio, the head typesetter, told them about my tantrum, and they agreed to leave things as they were until I gave them my reasons. To my misfortune, I forgot about it altogether until the day Alfonso and I agreed I would leave Crónica. When we finished, he said goodbye to me weak with laughter at a joke that was typical of him, strong but irresistible.
“The lucky thing is,” he said, “that we don’t even have to take your name off the masthead.”
Only then did I relive the incident as if it were a knife wound, and I felt the earth sinking beneath my feet, not because of what Alfonso had said in so opportune a way but because I had forgotten to clarify the matter. Alfonso, as was to be expected, gave me an adult interpretation. If it was the only injustice we had not aired, it was not decent to leave it pending without an explanation. Alfonso would take care of the rest with Álvaro and Germán, and if all of us were needed to save the boat, I could get back in two hours. As a last resort we were counting on the editorial board, a kind of Divine Providence that we never had managed to seat at the long walnut table of major decisions.
The comments of Germán and Álvaro filled me with the courage I needed to leave. Alfonso understood my reasons and accepted them with a kind of relief, but in no way did he suggest that Crónica would come to an end with my resignation. On the contrary, he advised me to take the crisis with serenity, calmed me down with the idea of constructing a firm base with the editorial board, and said he would let me know when something could be done that in reality would be worthwhile.
It was the first clue I had that Alfonso could conceive of the unimaginable possibility that Crónica would end. And it did, without grief or glory, on June 28, after fifty-eight issues in fourteen months. But half a century later, I have the impression that the magazine was an important event in the nation’s journalism. No complete collection remained, only the first six issues and some clippings in the Catalan library of Don Ramón Vinyes.
A fortunate coincidence was that they wanted to change the living-room furnitu
re in the house where I was living, and they offered it to me at a very reduced price. The night before I left, as I was settling accounts at El Heraldo, the paper agreed to pay me in advance for six months of “La Jirafa.” With part of that money I bought Mayito’s furniture for our house in Cartagena, because I knew the family was not taking what they had in Sucre and had no way to buy new furniture. I cannot omit that after fifty years it is in good condition and still in use, because my grateful mother never allowed it to be sold.
A week after my father’s visit I moved to Cartagena, taking only the furniture and little more than what I was wearing. In contrast to the first time, I knew how to do everything necessary, I was familiar with everything that might be needed in Cartagena, and I hoped with all my heart that things would go well for the family but not for me, as a punishment for my lack of character.
The house was in a good location in the district of La Popa, in the shadow of the historic convent that always has seemed on the verge of falling over a precipice. The four bedrooms and two bathrooms on the ground floor were reserved for the parents and their eleven children, ranging from me, the oldest, almost twenty-six years old, to Eligio, the youngest, who was five. All of them well brought up in the Caribbean culture of hammocks and straw mats on the floor and beds for as many as could fit in.
On the upper floor lived Uncle Hermógenes Sol, my father’s brother, and Carlos Martínez Simahan, his son. The entire house was not large enough for so many people, but the rent was lowered because of my uncle’s business dealings with the owner, about whom we knew only that she was very rich and was called La Pepa. The family, with its implacable gift for making jokes, did not take long to find the perfect address in the style of a popular tune: “The house of La Pepa at the foot of La Popa.”
The arrival of the offspring is a mysterious recollection for me. The electricity had gone out in half the city, and we were trying to prepare the house in the dark so that the children could go to sleep. We older children recognized one another by our voices, but the younger ones had changed so much since my last visit that their enormous sad eyes frightened me in the light of the candles. I endured the disorder of trunks, bundles, and hammocks hanging in the dark as a domestic April 9. But what made the deepest impression on me was trying to move a shapeless sack that kept slipping out of my hands. It contained the remains of my grandmother Tranquilina, which my mother had disinterred and taken along in order to place them in the ossuary of San Pedro Claver; the remains of my father and my aunt, Elvira Carrillo, are in the same crypt.
My uncle Hermógenes Sol was the providential man in that emergency. He had been appointed general secretary of the Departmental Police in Cartagena, and his first radical action was to open a bureaucratic breach to save the family. Including me, with my misguided politics and a reputation for being a Communist that I had earned not for my ideology but because of how I dressed. There were jobs for everyone. They gave an administrative position without political responsibility to Papá. My brother Luis Enrique was named a detective, and they gave me a sinecure in the offices of the National Census, which the Conservative government insisted on carrying out, perhaps in order to have some idea of how many of its adversaries were still alive. The moral cost of the job was more dangerous for me than the political cost, because I collected my salary every two weeks and could not let myself be seen in the area for the rest of the month in order to avoid questions. The official explanation, not only for me but for more than a hundred other employees, was that I was on assignment outside the city.
The Café Moka, across the street from the census offices, was always crowded with false bureaucrats from neighboring towns who came only to collect their money. There was not a céntimo for my personal use during the time I signed for my wages, because my salary was substantial but all of it went for household expenses. In the meantime, Papá had tried to matriculate me in the faculty of law and collided with the truth I had hidden from him. The mere fact that he knew it made me as happy as if I had received my diploma. My happiness was even more warranted because in the midst of so many setbacks and difficulties, I at last had found the time and space to finish my novel.
When I walked into El Universal they made me feel as if I were coming home. It was six in the evening, the busiest time, and the abrupt silence that my entrance caused at the linotypes and typewriters brought a lump to my throat. Not a minute had gone by for the Indian hair of Maestro Zabala. As if I had never left, he asked me to please write an editorial piece for him that had been delayed. An adolescent novice was using my typewriter, and he fell in his reckless haste to give up his seat to me. The first thing that surprised me was how difficult it was to write an anonymous note with editorial circumspection after some two years of the excesses of “La Jirafa.” I had a page of copy when the publisher López Escauriaza came over to say hello. His British impassivity was a commonplace in tertulias with friends and political caricatures, and I was touched by his flush of joy when he greeted me with a hug. When I finished the editorial, Zabala was waiting with a slip of paper on which the publisher had offered me a salary of one hundred twenty pesos a month for writing editorials. I was so impressed by the sum, unusual for that time and place, that I did not even give an answer or say thank you but sat down to write two more, intoxicated by the sensation that in reality the Earth did revolve around the Sun.
It was as if I had come back to my origins. The same topics corrected in liberal red by Maestro Zabala, then abbreviated by the same censorship of a censor already defeated by the impious tricks of the newsroom, the same midnights with steak topped by a fried egg and fried plantains at La Cueva, and the same topic of changing the world that went on until dawn on the Paseo de los Mártires. Rojas Herazo had spent a year selling paintings so that he could move anywhere else, until he married Rosa Isabel, la Grande, and moved to Bogotá. At the end of the night I sat down to write “La Jirafa,” which I sent to El Heraldo, by the only modern means available at the time, which was ordinary mail, and I missed very few times, always through force majeure, until the debt was paid.
Life with my entire family, in difficult circumstances, lies in the domain not of memory but imagination. My parents slept in a bedroom on the ground floor with some of the younger children. My four sisters felt they had the right to a bedroom of their own. Hernando and Alfredo Ricardo slept in the third, under the care of Jaime, who kept them in a state of alert with his philosophical and mathematical preaching. Rita, who was fourteen, studied until midnight at the street door, in the light of the streetlamp, in order to save electricity in the house. She memorized her lessons by singing them aloud with the grace and good diction that she still has. Many strange moments in my books come from her reading exercises, with the mule that goes to the mill, and the child who chases the chocolate chicken, and the seer who sees the seesaw.* The house was livelier and above all more human after midnight, between going to the kitchen for a drink of water, or to the toilet for liquid or solid emergencies, or hanging crisscrossed hammocks at different levels in the hallways. I slept on the second floor with Gustavo and Luis Enrique—when my uncle and his son moved into their family house—and later with Jaime, who was subjected to the penance of not pontificating about anything after nine o’clock. One night we were kept awake for several hours by the cyclical bleating of an orphaned lamb. Gustavo said in exasperation:
“It sounds like a lighthouse.”
I never forgot it, because at the time it was the kind of simile I caught on the fly in real life for the imminent novel.
It was the liveliest of several houses in Cartagena, which became more and more humble as the family’s resources diminished. Looking for cheaper neighborhoods, we came down in class until we reached the house in Toril, where the ghost of a woman would appear at night. I was lucky enough not to have been there, but the accounts of my parents and brothers and sisters caused me as much terror as if I had. On the first night my parents were dozing on the sofa in the living room, a
nd they saw the apparition as she passed from one bedroom to another, not looking at them, wearing a dress with little red flowers, her short hair fastened behind her ears with red ribbons. My mother described her down to the print on her dress and the style of her shoes. Papá denied having seen her in order not to further upset his wife or frighten the children, but the familiarity with which the apparition moved through the house starting at dusk did not permit anyone to ignore her. My sister Margot once woke before dawn and saw her on the rail of her bed, scrutinizing her with an intense gaze. But what affected her most was the terror of being seen from the next life.
On Sunday, coming out of Mass, a neighbor confirmed for my mother that no one had lived in that house for many years because of the boldness of the phantom, who once appeared in the dining room in the middle of the day while the family was eating lunch. The next day my mother went out with two of the youngest children to look for a house to move into, and she found one in four hours. But it was difficult for most of my brothers and sisters to exorcise the idea that the ghost of the dead woman had moved along with them.
In the house at the foot of La Popa, in spite of all the time I had at my disposal, I took so much joy in writing that the days seemed too short. Ramiro de la Espriella reappeared with his degree of doctor of laws, more political than ever and enthusiastic about his readings of recent novels. Above all Skin, by Curzio Malaparte, which that year had become a key book for my generation. The effectiveness of its prose, the vigor of its intelligence, and the truculent conception of contemporary history kept us trapped until dawn. But time showed us that Malaparte was destined to be a useful example of virtues other than the ones I desired, and in the end they overthrew his image. Just the opposite of what happened to us almost at the same time with Albert Camus.
The De la Espriellas lived close to us at the time, and they had a family wine cellar that they looted in innocent bottles and brought to our house. Disregarding the advice of Don Ramón Vinyes, I would read long selections from my rough drafts to them and my brothers and sisters, just as they were, with the rubbish still not cleared away, and on the same strips of newsprint where I wrote everything during my sleepless nights at El Universal.
Living to Tell the Tale Page 44