Living to Tell the Tale (22 page)

The truth is that in the discussions regarding the education of each
child, I was always sustained by the hope that Papá, in one of his Homeric rages, would decree that none of us would go back to school. It was not impossible. He was self-taught because of the overwhelming force of his poverty, and his father had been inspired by the steel morality of Fernando VII, who proclaimed individual instruction at home in order to preserve the integrity of the family. I feared
secondary school as if it were jail, the mere idea of living subjected to a regimen of bells frightened me, but it also was my only chance to enjoy a free life after I was thirteen, to have good relations with the family but far from its discipline, its demographic enthusiasm, its unsettled days, and to read without stopping for breath for as long as the light lasted.

My only argument against
the Colegio San José, one of the most demanding and expensive schools in the Caribbean, was its martial discipline, but my mother stopped me with a premonition: “They make governors there.” When retreat was no longer possible, my father washed his hands of the matter:

“It should be noted that I didn’t say either yes or no.”

He would have preferred the Colegio Americano so that I would learn
English, but my mother rejected it with the perverse argument that it was a den of Lutherans. Today I have to admit, to be fair to my father, that one of the defects in my life as a writer has been not speaking English.

Seeing Barranquilla again from the bridge of the same
Capitán de Caro
on which we had traveled three months earlier troubled my heart, as if I had sensed that I was only returning
to real life. It was fortunate that my parents had arranged room and board for me with my cousin José María Valdeblánquez and his wife Hortensia, who were young and amiable, and who shared their peaceful life with me in a simple living room, a bedroom, and a paved courtyard that was always in shadow because of the clothes hung out to dry on the lines. They slept in the bedroom with their six-month-old
daughter. I slept in the living room on the sofa, which turned into a bed at night.

The Colegio San José was about six blocks away, in a park with almond trees where the oldest cemetery in the city had been located and where unattached bones and scraps of corpses’ clothing could still be found level with the paving stones. On the day I entered the main courtyard there was a ceremony for the first-year
students, wearing the Sunday uniform of white trousers and blue flannel jacket, and I could not control my terror that they knew everything I did not. But I soon realized they were as raw and frightened as I was facing the uncertainties of the future.

My personal phantom was Brother Pedro Reyes, prefect of the elementary division, who was bent on convincing the superiors of the academy that I
was not prepared for the baccalaureate. He became the nightmare who would waylay me in the most unexpected places and give me instant examinations with diabolical pitfalls: “Do you believe God can make a stone so
heavy He cannot carry it?” he asked and gave me no time to think. Or this other cursed trap: “If we placed a gold belt fifty centimeters thick around the equator, how much would the weight
of Earth increase?” I could not get a single question right, even if I had known the answers, because my tongue stumbled in terror the way it had my first day on the telephone. The terror was well founded because Brother Reyes was right. I was not prepared for the baccalaureate, but I could not give up the good fortune of having been admitted without an examination. The mere sight of him made
me tremble. Some classmates gave malicious interpretations to the siege but I had no reason to think they were true. Besides, my conscientiousness helped me because I passed my first oral exam with no opposition when I recited Fray Luis de León like flowing water, and with colored chalks drew a Christ that looked alive on the blackboard. The panel was so pleased it also forgot about arithmetic and
national history.

The problem with Brother Reyes was settled because during Holy Week he needed some drawings for his botany class, and I made them for him without blinking. He not only called a halt to his siege but at times spent recess periods teaching me the well-founded answers to the questions I had not been able to answer, or to some even stranger that then appeared as if by accident on
my next first-year exams. But whenever I was in a group he would joke, weak with laughter, that I was the only student in the third year of elementary who was doing well in his baccalaureate. Today I realize he was right. Above all on account of spelling, which was my Calvary throughout my time in school and continues to astound the people who proofread my originals. The most benevolent console
themselves with the belief that they are typing errors.

A relief for my fears and alarms was the appointment of the painter and writer Héctor Rojas Herazo to the position of drawing teacher. He must have been about twenty. He came into the classroom accompanied by Father Prefect, and his greeting echoed like a slammed door in the stupor of three in the afternoon. He had the beauty and easy elegance
of a movie
star, in a very close-fitting camel’s hair jacket with gold buttons, multicolored vest, and print silk tie. But the most extraordinary thing was his melon-shaped hat when the temperature was ninety degrees in the shade. He was as tall as the lintel, so that he had to bend down to draw on the blackboard. Standing beside him, Father Prefect seemed abandoned by the hand of God.

From the
beginning it was evident he did not have a method or the patience for teaching, but his mischievous humor kept us in suspense, just as we were astounded by the masterful drawings he put on the board with colored chalks. He did not last more than three months in the position, we never knew why, but one could assume that his secular pedagogy was not compatible with the mental order of the Company
of Jesus.

From the start I won fame as a poet at the
colegio,
first because of the facility with which I could memorize and recite at the top of my lungs the poems by Spanish classic and romantic poets in our textbooks, and then because of the rhymed satires I dedicated to my classmates in the
colegio
magazine. I would not have written them or would have paid a little more attention to them if
I had imagined they were going to deserve the glory of being in print. For in reality they were affable satires that circulated on furtive scraps of paper around the soporific two-in-the-afternoon classrooms. Father Luis Posada—prefect of the second division—captured one, read it with a severe frown, reprimanded me as required, but kept it in his pocket. Then Father Arturo Mejía called me to his
office to propose that the confiscated satires be published in the magazine
Juventud,
the official organ of the students at the
colegio.
My immediate reaction was a stomach cramp of surprise, embarrassment, and joy, which I resolved with a not very convincing refusal:

“They’re just dumb things of mine.”

Father Mejía made note of my reply, and with the authorization of the victims he published
the verses under that title—“Dumb Things of Mine”—and signed
Gabito,
in the next issue of the magazine. In two successive issues I had to publish
another series at the request of my classmates. So those youthful verses—for better or worse—are, to be precise, my
opera prima.

The vice of reading anything that came my way occupied my free time and almost all my class time. I could recite entire
poems from the popular repertoire in common use at the time in Colombia, and the most beautiful ones of the Golden Age and Spanish romanticism, many of them learned from the
colegio
’s textbooks. This extemporaneous knowledge at my age exasperated my teachers, for whenever they asked me a lethal question in class I would answer with a literary quotation or some bookish idea that they were in no
position to evaluate. Father Mejía said: “He’s an affected child,” in order not to call me unbearable. I never had to force my memory, because poems and certain passages of good classic prose were etched in my mind after three or four readings. The first fountain pen I ever had was given to me by Father Prefect because I recited without any mistakes the fifty-seven ten-line stanzas of “Vertigo” by
Gaspar Núñez de Arce.

I would read in my classes, the book open on my knees, with so much brazenness that my impunity seemed possible only through the complicity of the teachers. The one thing I could not achieve with my well-rhymed glibness was to have them excuse me from daily Mass at seven in the morning. In addition to writing those “dumb things of mine,” I was a soloist in the choir, drew
comic caricatures, recited poems at solemn sessions, and did so many other extracurricular things that no one could understand when I studied. The answer was as simple as could be: I did not study.

In the midst of so much excessive dynamism, I still do not understand why my teachers concerned themselves so much with me but did not cry out in horror at my bad spelling. Unlike my mother, who hid
some of my letters from Papá in order to keep him alive, and returned others to me corrected, at times with her compliments on my grammatical progress and good use of words. But at the end of two years there were no improvements in sight. Today my problem is still the same: I never could understand why silent letters are allowed, or two
different letters with the same sound, and so many other
pointless rules.

This was how I discovered a vocation that would accompany me all my life: the pleasure I took in conversing with students who were older than I. Even today, at gatherings of young people who could be my grandchildren, I have to make an effort not to feel younger than they. And so I became friends with two older students who would later be my companions in historic periods of
my life. One was Juan B. Fernández, son of one of the three founders and owners of the newspaper
El Heraldo,
in Barranquilla, where I got my feet wet as a reporter, and he had been trained from the time he learned his ABCs all the way to the management offices. The other was Enrique Scopell, son of a Cuban photographer who was legendary in the city, and himself a graphic reporter. However, my
gratitude toward him was not so much for our common work in the press as for his occupation as a tanner of wild-animal skins that he exported all over the world. On one of my first trips out of the country he gave me a caiman skin that was three meters long.

“This skin is worth a fortune,” he said without melodrama, “but I advise you not to sell it unless you think you’re going to die of hunger.”

I still ask myself how well the wise Quique Scopell knew he was giving me an eternal amulet, for in reality I would have had to sell it many times over during my years of recurrent famine. But I still have it, dusty and almost petrified, because since I began carrying it all around the world in my suitcase, I never again lacked the money to eat.

The Jesuit teachers, so severe in the classroom,
were different during recess periods, when they taught us what was not said inside and confided what they really would have liked to teach. As far as it was possible at my age, I believe I remember that the difference was very noticeable and helped us even more. Father Luis Posada, a young Cachaco with a progressive mentality who worked for many years in labor union circles, had a file of cards
with all kinds of condensed encyclopedic clues, in particular about books and authors. Father Ignacio Zaldívar was a mountain Basque whom I continued to see in
Cartagena until his honorable old age in the convent of San Pedro Claver. Father Eduardo Núñez was already well along in his monumental history of Colombian literature, whose fate I never learned. The aged Father Manuel Hidalgo, the singing
teacher who was already very old, detected vocations on his own and permitted unexpected incursions into pagan music.

I had a few casual chats with Father Pieschacón, the rector, and as a result I was certain he viewed me as an adult, not only because of the topics he raised but on account of his daring explanations. He was decisive in my life in clarifying my conception of heaven and hell, which
I could not reconcile with the information in the catechism because of simple geographical obstacles. The rector assuaged the effect of those dogmas with his bold ideas. Heaven was, without further theological complications, the presence of God. Hell, of course, was its opposite. But on two occasions he confessed to me that for him the problem was that “in any event there was fire in hell,” but
he could not explain it. More because of these lessons during recess periods than formal classes, when I finished the year my chest was armored with medals.

My first vacation in Sucre began on a Sunday at four in the afternoon, on a dock decorated with garlands and colored balloons, and in a square transformed into a Christmas bazaar. As soon as I stepped on solid ground, a very beautiful blond
girl threw her arms around my neck with an overwhelming spontaneity and smothered me with kisses. It was my sister Carmen Rosa, Papá’s daughter before he married, who had come to spend some time with her unknown family. Another son of Papá’s had also arrived on that occasion: Abelardo, a good professional tailor who opened his shop on one side of the main square and, in my puberty, taught me about
life.

The new house with its new furniture had a party air and a new brother: Jaime, born in May under the auspicious sign of Gemini, and three months premature. I did not know about him until I arrived, for my parents seemed determined to moderate the annual births, but my mother hastened to explain that this was a tribute to St. Rita for the prosperity that had come into the house. She was
rejuvenated and happy, more of a singer
than ever, and Papá was floating on an air of good humor, the consulting room full and the pharmacy well stocked, in particular on Sundays when patients came from the nearby mountains. I do not know if he ever found out that this affluence was due in fact to his fame as a healer, though the country people did not attribute this to the homeopathic virtues
of his little sugar drops and prodigious amounts of water but to his superior arts as a sorcerer.