Living to Tell the Tale (24 page)

My first emotion in a Barranquilla without my parents was an awareness of free will. I had friendships that I maintained outside of school. Among them Álvaro del Toro—who played
second voice in my declamations during recess—and the Arteta tribe, with whom I would escape
to bookstores and the movies. For the only restriction imposed on me in the house of Uncle Eliécer, in deference to his responsibility, was that I not come home after eight at night.

One day when I was waiting for César del Valle, reading in the living room of his house, a surprising woman came to visit him. Her name was Martina Fonseca, a white cast in the mold of an intelligent, autonomous
mulatta, who may well have been the poet’s lover. For two or three hours I lived to the full the pleasure of conversing with her, until César came home and they left together without saying where they were going. I heard nothing more about her until Ash Wednesday of that year, when I left High Mass and found her waiting for me on a bench in the park. I thought she was an apparition. She was wearing
a dress of embroidered linen that purified her beauty, a bead necklace, and a flower of living fire in her low-cut neckline. Still, what I now appreciate most in memory is the way she invited me to her house without the slightest indication of premeditation, and without our considering the holy sign of the ashen cross that we both had on our foreheads. Her husband, a ship’s pilot on the Magdalena
River, was on his regular twelve-day voyage. What was strange about his wife inviting me on a casual Saturday for hot chocolate and crullers? Except that the ritual was repeated for the rest of the year when her husband was away on his ship, and always from four to seven, which was the time of the children’s program at the Rex Theater, which in the house of Uncle Eliécer served as my excuse for
being with her.

Her professional specialty was preparing elementary-school teachers for promotions. She attended the best qualified in her free hours with hot chocolate and crullers, so that the new pupil on Saturdays did not attract the attention of her talkative neighbors. The fluidity of the secret love that burned over a blazing fire from March to November was surprising. After the first
two Saturdays I thought I would not be able to endure my raging desire to be with her all the time.

We were safe from all danger because her husband would
announce his arrival in the city with a code so that she would know he was coming into port. That is what happened on the third Saturday of our affair, when we were in bed and the distant howl was heard. She became tense.

“Be still,” she said
to me and waited for two more howls. She did not jump out of bed, as I expected on account of my own fear, but she continued, undaunted: “We still have more than three hours of life left.”

She had described him to me as a “huge black over two meters tall with an artilleryman’s tool.” I was about to break the rules of the game because of an attack of jealousy, and not in a casual way: I wanted
to kill him. Her maturity resolved everything, and from then on she led me by the halter past the pitfalls of real life as if I were a wolf cub in sheep’s clothing.

I was doing very poor work in school and did not want to hear anything about it, but Martina took charge of my student’s Calvary. She was surprised by the childishness of neglecting classes in order to humor the demon of an irresistible
vocation for life. “It’s logical,” I told her. “If this bed were the academy and you were the teacher, I’d be number one not only in class but in the whole school.” She took this as a good example.

“That’s just what we’re going to do,” she said.

Without too many sacrifices she undertook the task of my rehabilitation with a fixed schedule. She organized assignments for me and prepared me for
the following week between tumbles in bed and a mother’s reprimands. If my homework was not correct and on time, she would punish me with the interdiction of one Saturday for every three failures. I never went past two. The change began to be noticed at school.

However, what she taught me in practice was an infallible formula that was of use to me, sad to say, only in the last year of my baccalaureate:
if I paid attention in classes and did the assignments myself instead of copying them from my classmates, I would get a good grade and be able to read as much as I liked in my free hours, and lead my own life without exhausting all-night study sessions or useless fears. Thanks to this magical prescription I was first in the class that year of 1942 and received a medal of excellence and
all kinds of honorable
mentions. But confidential gratitude went to the doctors for how well they had cured me of my madness. At the celebration I realized that there was a bad dose of cynicism in the emotion with which I had expressed my thanks in earlier years for the recognition of merits that were not mine. In my last year, when it was deserved, it seemed to me decent not to thank anyone.
But I responded with all my heart with the poem “The Circus,” by Guillermo Valencia, which I recited in its entirety without a prompter in the final ceremony, more frightened than a Christian facing the lions.

During the vacation of that good year I had planned to visit my grandmother Tranquilina in Aracataca, but she had to go to Barranquilla for urgent surgery on her cataracts. The happiness
of seeing her again was made complete by my grandfather’s dictionary, which she brought to me as a gift. She had never been aware that she was losing her sight, or had refused to admit it, until she could no longer leave her room. The operation at the Caridad Hospital was quick and had a good prognosis. When the bandages were removed, while she was sitting on the bed, she opened the shining eyes
of her renewed youth and summarized her joy in three words:

“I can see.”

The surgeon tried to determine just what she could see, and she swept the room with her new eyes and enumerated each thing with admirable precision. The doctor was astounded, but only I knew that the things my grandmother enumerated were not the ones in front of her in the hospital room but the ones in her bedroom in Aracataca,
which she knew by heart and remembered in their correct order. She never recovered her sight.

My parents insisted that I spend the vacation with them in Sucre and bring my grandmother with me. Much older than her age warranted, and with her mind adrift, the beauty of her voice had been refined and my grandmother sang more and with more inspiration than ever. My mother made certain she was kept
clean and dressed, like an enormous doll. It was evident she was aware of the world but referred everything to the past. Above all radio programs, which awakened a childish interest in her. She recognized the voices of various announcers whom she
identified as friends of her youth in Riohacha, because she had never had a radio in her house in Aracataca. She contradicted or criticized some commentaries
by the announcers, discussed the most varied subjects with them or reproached them for grammatical errors, as if they were present in the flesh beside her bed, and she refused to have her clothes changed until they took their leave. Then she would respond with her good manners intact:

“Have a very pleasant evening, Señor.”

Many mysteries regarding lost objects, secrets that had been kept, or
forbidden subjects were clarified in her monologues: who hid the water basin that disappeared from the house in Aracataca in her trunk and then made off with it, who really had been the father of Matilde Salmona, who had been riddled with bullets when his brothers confused him with someone else.

My first vacation in Sucre without Martina Fonseca was not easy, but there was not even the slightest
possibility that she would go away with me. The mere idea of not seeing her for two months had seemed unreal to me. But not to her. On the contrary, when I brought up the subject she was already, as usual, three steps ahead of me.

“I wanted to talk to you about that,” she said without any mystery. “The best thing for both of us would be if you went to study somewhere else now that we’re both
raving mad. Then you’ll realize that what we have will never be more than what it already was.”

I thought she was joking.

“I’ll leave tomorrow and be back in three months to stay with you.”

She replied with tango music:

“Ha, ha, ha, ha!”

Then I learned that Martina was easy to persuade when she said yes but never when she said no. And so I accepted the challenge, bathed in tears, and proposed
being another person in the life she planned for me: another city, another school, another group of friends, even another way of living. I barely thought about it. With the authority of my many medals, the
first thing I said to my father with a certain solemnity was that I would not return to the Colegio San José. Or to Barranquilla.

“God be praised!” he said. “I’ve always wondered where you
got the romantic idea of studying with the Jesuits.”

My mother ignored his comments.

“If it’s not there, it has to be in Bogotá,” she said.

“Then it won’t be anywhere,” replied Papá without delay, “because no money is ever enough for the Cachacos.”

It is strange, but the mere idea of not continuing to study, which had been the dream of my life, now seemed unimaginable. To the point where I
had recourse to a dream that never had seemed attainable.

“There are scholarships,” I said.

“Lots,” said Papá, “but for the rich.”

In part this was true, not because of favoritism but because the application procedures were difficult and the requirements not well publicized. As a result of centralism, everyone who aspired to a scholarship had to go to Bogotá, a distance of a thousand kilometers
in eight days of travel that cost almost as much as three months at a good boarding school. But even so it might be pointless. My mother became exasperated:

“When you start scheming about money, you know where it begins but not where it ends.”

Besides, there were other obligations that had not yet been paid. Luis Enrique, a year younger than I, had matriculated in two local schools and had dropped
out of both of them after a few months. Margarita and Aida were doing well at the nuns’ primary school, but they had already begun thinking about a cheaper city nearby for their baccalaureates. Gustavo, Ligia, Rita, and Jaime were not yet a pressing concern, but they were growing at an alarming rate. They, as well as the three who were born after them, treated me like someone who always arrived
only to leave again.

It was my decisive year. The greatest attraction of each float were the girls chosen for their grace and beauty, and dressed like queens, who recited verses that alluded to the symbolic war between the two halves of the town. Still half an outsider, I enjoyed the privilege of being neutral, which is how I behaved.
That year, however, I gave in to the pleas of the captains
of Congoveo to write the verses for my sister Carmen Rosa, who would be the queen of a monumental float. I was delighted to oblige, but because of my ignorance of the rules of the game, I went too far in my attacks on the adversary. I had no other recourse but to rectify the transgression with two poems of peace: one of atonement for the beauty from Congoveo and another of reconciliation for the
beauty from Zulia. The incident became public. The anonymous poet, almost unknown in town, was the hero of the day. The episode introduced me into society and earned me the friendship of both bands. From then on I did not have enough time to help at children’s plays, charity bazaars, philanthropic fairs, and even the speech of a candidate for the municipal council.

Luis Enrique, who was already
showing signs of the inspired guitarist he would become, taught me to play the
tiple,
the treble guitar. With him and Filadelfo Velilla we became the kings of serenades, the first prize being that some of the serenaded girls dressed in a hurry, opened the house, woke the girls next door, and we continued the party until breakfast. That year the group was enhanced when it was joined by José Palencia,
the grandson of a wealthy and generous landowner. José was a born musician capable of playing any instrument he came across. He looked like a movie star, was a stellar dancer, had a dazzling intelligence, and luck more envied than enviable in transient loves.

I, on the other hand, did not know how to dance and could not learn even in the house of the Señoritas Loiseau, six sisters, invalids from
birth, who nonetheless gave classes in fine dancing without getting up from their rocking chairs. My father, never insensitive to reputation, approached me with a new point of view. For the first time we spent long hours talking. We almost did not know each other. In reality, looking back on it, I did not live with my parents for a total of more than three years, adding up the time with them in
Aracataca, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Sincé, and Sucre. It was a very agreeable experience that allowed me to know them better. My mother said to me: “How nice that you’ve become friends with your papá.” Days
later, while she was preparing coffee in the kitchen, she said even more:

“Your papá is very proud of you.”

The next day she tiptoed in to wake me and breathed in my ear: “Your papá has a
surprise for you.” In fact, when he came down for breakfast, he himself gave me the news in the presence of everyone, and said with a solemn emphasis:

“Get your stuff together, you’re going to Bogotá.”

The initial impact was one of great frustration, because what I would have wanted then was to remain submerged in perpetual carousing. But innocence prevailed. There was no problem about clothes
for cold weather. My father had a black cheviot twill suit and another of corduroy, and he could not button either one at the waist. We went to Pedro León Rosales, called the tailor of miracles, and he altered them to fit me. My mother also bought me the camel’s hair overcoat of a dead senator. When she was measuring it on me at home, my sister Ligia—who is a natural clairvoyant—warned me in secret
that the ghost of the senator was wandering through his house at night wearing the overcoat. I paid no attention to her, but I should have, because when I put it on in Bogotá, I saw the face of the dead senator in the mirror. I pawned it for ten pesos and never redeemed it.