Living to Tell the Tale (25 page)

The domestic atmosphere had improved so much that I was on the verge of tears when we said our goodbyes, but the plan was
followed in a precise way, without sentimentality. In the second week of January, in Magangué, I embarked on the
David Arango,
the flagship of the Colombian Shipping Company, after spending one night as a free man. My cabinmate was an angel who weighed two hundred twenty pounds and whose entire body was hairless. He had usurped the name Jack the Ripper, and he was the last survivor of a family
of circus knife throwers from Asia Minor. At first glance he looked capable of strangling me in my sleep, but in the days that followed I realized he was only what he seemed: a giant baby with a heart too big for his body.

There was an official party on the first night, with an orchestra and a gala supper, but I escaped to the deck, contemplated
for the last time the lights of the world I was
preparing to forget without sorrow, and cried my eyes out until dawn. Today I can dare to say that the only reason I would want to be a boy again is to enjoy that voyage once more. I had to take the trip back and forth several times during the four years of the baccalaureate and another two at the university, and each time I learned more about life than I did in school, and learned it better than
I did in school. At the time of year when the water was high, it was a five-day trip from Barranquilla to Puerto Salgar, where you then had to travel by train to Bogotá. In times of drought, when sailing was more amusing if you were not in a hurry, it could take up to three weeks.

The ships had easy, basic names:
Atlántico, Medellín, Capitán de Caro, David Arango.
Their captains, like those of
Conrad, were authoritarian, good-natured men who ate like savages and did not know how to sleep alone in their regal cabins. The voyages were slow and surprising. We passengers sat in the galleries all day in order to see the forgotten villages, the coffin-shaped caimans, their jaws open waiting for unwary butterflies, the flocks of herons that took flight, startled by the wake of the ship, the
coveys of ducks from the interior swamps, the manatees that sang on the wide beaches as they suckled their babies. During the whole voyage you woke at dawn dazed by the clamoring of monkeys and cockatoos. Often, your siesta was interrupted by the nauseating stench of a drowned cow, motionless in the trickle of water, a solitary turkey buzzard perched on its belly.

Now it is unusual to meet anyone
on a plane. On the riverboats we students ended up seeming like one family, because every year we would arrange to make the trip at the same time. At times the ship would be stranded for up to fifteen days on a sandbar. No one cared, because the fiesta continued, and a letter from the captain sealed with his signet ring served as an excuse for arriving late at school.

From the first day I was
struck by the youngest member of a family group who played the
bandoneón
as if half asleep, strolling for days on end along the deck in first class. I could not endure my envy, because ever since I heard the first accordion
players of Francisco el Hombre on the July 20 celebrations in Aracataca I had urged my grandfather to buy me an accordion, but my grandmother always blocked us with the usual
absurdities about the accordion being a vulgar instrument for the lower classes. Some thirty years later in Paris I thought I recognized the elegant accordionist from the ship at an international conference of neurologists. Time had done its work: he had grown a bohemian beard and his clothes were larger by a couple of sizes, but the memory of his artistry was so vivid I could not be mistaken.
His reaction, however, could not have been colder when I asked him without introducing myself:

“How’s the
bandoneón
?”

He replied in surprise:

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I felt the earth swallowing me, and I gave him my humble excuses for having confused him with a student who played the
bandoneón
on the
David Arango
early in January of 1944. Then he gleamed with the memory.
He was the Colombian Salomón Hakim, one of the great neurologists in this world. The disappointment was that he had exchanged the
bandoneón
for medical engineering.

Another passenger attracted my attention because of his distance. He was young, robust, with a ruddy complexion, glasses for nearsightedness, and a premature baldness that he carried off very well. He seemed the perfect image of the
Cachaco tourist. From the first day he cornered the most comfortable armchair, placed several towers of new books on an end table, and read without blinking from the morning until he was distracted by the carousing at night. Every day he appeared in the dining room wearing a different flowered beach shirt, and he ate breakfast, lunch, and supper, and continued reading alone at the most isolated
table. I do not believe he had exchanged a single greeting with anyone. In my mind I baptized him “the insatiable reader.”

I did not resist the temptation of sneaking a look at his books. Most were indigestible treatises on public law, which he read in the mornings, underlining and making notes in the
margins. When the afternoons grew cool he read novels. Among them, one that astonished me: Dostoyevsky’s
The Double,
which I had tried without success to steal from a bookstore in Barranquilla. I was mad to read it. In fact, I would have asked to borrow it but did not have the courage. One day he showed up with
The Great Meaulnes,
which I had not heard of but which very soon became one of my favorite masterpieces. On the other hand, I carried only unrepeatable books that I had already read:
Jeromín,
by Father Coloma, that I never finished reading;
The Vortex,
by José Eustasio Rivera;
From the Apennines to the Andes,
by Edmundo de Amicis, and my grandfather’s dictionary, which I read for hours. The implacable reader, on the contrary, did not have enough time for all the books he had. What I mean to say and have not said is that I would have given anything to be him.

The third traveler, of
course, was Jack the Ripper, my roommate, who talked in his sleep in a barbaric tongue for hours on end. His speeches had a melodic quality that gave a new depth to my readings in the middle of the night. He told me he was not aware of it and did not know what language he could be dreaming in, because as a boy he could talk with the acrobats in his circus in six Asian dialects but had forgotten all
of them when his mother died. All that was left was Polish, his original language, but we were able to establish that this was not what he was speaking in his sleep. I do not recall a creature more lovable as he oiled and tested the edges of his sinister knives on his rosy tongue.

His only problem had been on the first day in the dining room, when he protested to the waiters that he could not
survive the voyage if they did not serve him four portions. The bosun explained that it would be fine if he paid for them as a supplement with a special discount. He claimed that he had traveled the oceans of the world and on all of them they had recognized his human right not to die of hunger. The case went all the way to the captain, who decided in very Colombian fashion that he should be served
two portions, and that the waiters could be distracted enough to let two more slip from their hands. He also helped himself by picking with his fork at
the plates of his table companions and a few neighbors without appetite who took pleasure in his ideas. You had to be there to believe it.

I did not know what to do with myself until La Gloria, where a group of students boarded and formed trios
and quartets at night and sang beautiful serenades of romantic boleros. When I discovered that they had an extra
tiple,
I took it over and rehearsed with them in the afternoons, and we would sing until dawn. The tedium of my free time found a remedy in a solution that came from the heart: whoever does not sing cannot imagine the pleasure of singing.

One night when there was a full moon we were
awakened by a heartrending lament from the riverbank. The captain, Climaco Conde Abello, one of the greatest of them, gave an order to use searchlights to find the origin of the weeping: it was a manatee female who had become entangled in the branches of a fallen tree. Launches went into the water, and they moored her to a capstan and managed to free her. She was a fantastic, touching creature,
half woman and half cow, almost four meters long. Her skin was livid and tender, and her large-breasted torso was that of a biblical matriarch. It was this same Captain Conde Abello whom I heard say, for the first time, that the world would come to an end if people kept killing the animals in the river, and he prohibited shooting from his boat.

“Whoever wants to kill somebody can go kill him
in his own house!” he shouted. “Not on my ship!”

January 19, 1961, seventeen years later, I remember as a hateful day because a friend called me in Mexico to tell me that the steamship
David Arango
had caught fire and burned to ashes in the port of Magangué. I hung up with the terrible realization that my youth had ended that day, and the little still left to us of our river of nostalgic memories
had gone to hell. Today the Magdalena River is dead, its waters polluted, its animals annihilated. The work of restoration talked about so much by successive governments that have done nothing would require the planting by experts of some sixty million trees on ninety percent of privately owned lands whose owners would have to give
up, for sheer love of country, ninety percent of their current
incomes.

Each voyage taught great lessons about life that connected us in an ephemeral but unforgettable way to the life of the towns we passed through, and many of us became forever caught up in their destinies. A renowned medical student went to a wedding dance uninvited, danced without permission with the prettiest woman at the party, and was shot to death by her husband. Another, in an epic
bout of drinking, married the first girl he liked in Puerto Berrío and is still happy with her and their nine children. José Palencia, our friend from Sucre, won a cow in a drummers’ competition in Tenerife and sold it on the spot for fifty pesos: a fortune at the time. In the immense red-light district in Barrancabermeja, the oil capital, we were astounded to find Angel Casij Palencia, José’s
first cousin who had disappeared without a trace from Sucre the previous year, singing with the band in a brothel. The band took care of the bill for the dancing and carousing that lasted until dawn.

My ugliest memory is of a gloomy tavern in Puerto Berrío, where the police drove four of us passengers out with clubs, not giving or listening to any explanations, and arrested us on the charge of
having raped a female student. When we reached police headquarters they already had the real culprits—some local thugs who had nothing to do with our boat—behind bars, without a scratch.

At the final port of call, Puerto Salgar, we had to disembark at five in the morning dressed for the high country. Men in black wool with vests and mushroom-shaped hats and topcoats over their arms had changed
identities surrounded by the psaltery of the toads and the pestilential stink of the river overflowing with dead animals. When it was time to go ashore I had an unexpected surprise. An eleventh-hour friend had convinced my mother to make me a Corroncho, or coastal
petate,
with its narrow string hammock, wool blanket, and an emergency chamber pot, all of it wrapped in a mat made of esparto grass
and tied into a cross with the cords of the hammock. My musical companions could not contain their laughter at seeing
me with that kind of baggage in the cradle of civilization, and the most determined of them did what I would not have dared to do: he threw it into the water. My final vision of that unforgettable trip was the sight of the
petate
returning to its origins as it rolled in the current.

During the first four hours the train from Puerto Salgar climbed the rock cornices as if it were crawling. On the steepest sections it would slide back in order to gather momentum and attempt the ascent again, breathing as hard as a dragon. At times it was necessary for the passengers to get out to lighten the load and climb to the next cornice on foot. The towns along the way were sad and ice-cold,
and in the deserted stations all that waited for us were the women who were lifelong vendors and offered through the train windows fat yellow chickens cooked whole and some snowy potatoes that tasted like heaven. That was where I felt for the first time an unknown and invisible physical state: cold. It was fortunate that at dusk, the immense savannas, as green and beautiful as a sea in heaven,
opened without warning toward the horizon. The world became tranquil and fast-moving. The atmosphere in the train changed.

I had forgotten altogether about the insatiable reader when he appeared all of a sudden and sat across from me with a look of urgency. It was incredible. He had been impressed by a bolero that we sang at night on the ship, and he asked me to copy it down for him. Not only
did I do that, but I taught him how to sing it. I was surprised by his good ear and the brilliance of his voice when he sang it alone the first time, without mistakes.

“That woman’s going to die when she hears it!” he exclaimed, radiant.

Then I understood his urgency. When he heard us sing the bolero on the ship, he felt it would be a revelation for the sweetheart who had said goodbye to him
three months earlier in Bogotá and was waiting for him that afternoon in the station. He had heard it again two or three times, and was able to reconstruct it in bits and pieces, but when he saw me sitting alone on the train, he had resolved to ask the favor. Then I also felt bold enough to tell him, with some malice, though it had
nothing to do with anything, how surprised I had been to see on
his table a book that was so difficult to find. His surprise was authentic:

“Which one?”

“The Double.”

He laughed with satisfaction.

“I haven’t finished it yet,” he said. “But it’s one of the strangest things I’ve come across.”