Living to Tell the Tale (29 page)

This was a profound change in domestic relations. The spectral image of the former rector
was replaced by a concrete presence who maintained the proper distance but was always within reach. He did away with the routine inspection of our personal grooming and other useless regulations, and at times he would converse with students during the nighttime recreational period.

The new style set me on my path. Perhaps Calderón had spoken about me to the new rector, because on one of the first
nights he probed in an oblique way into my relationship to poetry, and I let out everything I had inside. He asked me if I had read
The Literary Experience,
a book by Don Alfonso Reyes that had been the subject of much discussion. I confessed that I had not, and he brought it to me the next day. I devoured half of it under cover of my desk in three successive classes, and the rest at recreation
periods on the soccer field. It made me happy that so prestigious an essayist would take the time to study the songs of Agustín Lara as if they were poems by Garcilaso, with the pretext of an ingenious phrase: “The popular songs of Agustín Lara are not popular songs.”
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For me it was like finding poetry dissolved into the soup of daily life.

Martín gave up the magnificent apartment in the rectory.
He installed his office with open doors in the main courtyard, and this brought him even closer to our conversations after supper. He moved with his wife and children, intending to stay, into a well-maintained colonial mansion on a corner of the main square, with a study whose walls were lined with all the books a reader attentive to the renovative tastes of those years could dream of. On weekends
his friends from Bogotá would visit him there, in particular his comrades from Stone and Sky. One
Sunday I had to go to his house with Guillermo López Guerra on an errand, and Eduardo Carranza and Jorge Rojas, the two great stars, were there. With a rapid gesture the rector had us sit down so we would not interrupt the conversation, and we were there for half an hour without understanding a word
because they were discussing a book by Paul Valéry, whom we had not even heard of. I had seen Carranza more than once in bookstores and cafés in Bogotá, and I would have been able to identify him just by the timbre and fluidity of his voice, which corresponded to his casual clothes and way of being: a poet. On the other hand, I could not have identified Jorge Rojas because of his ministerial attire
and style until Carranza addressed him by name. I longed to be present at a discussion about poetry among three of the greatest, but it did not happen. When they had finished with their subject, the rector put his hand on my shoulder and said to his guests:

“This is a great poet.”

He said it as a courtesy, of course, but I felt struck by lightning. Carlos Martín insisted on taking our picture
with the two great poets, and he did, in fact, but I knew nothing more about it until half a century later in his house on the Catalan coast, where he retired to enjoy his honorable old age.

The
liceo
was shaken by a renovatory wind. The radio, which we had used only for dancing with one another, was transformed under Carlos Martín into an instrument for disseminating information, and for the
first time the evening news was listened to and discussed in the recreational courtyard. Cultural activity increased with the creation of a literary center and the publication of a newspaper. When we made up a list of possible candidates based on their well-defined literary interests, the number gave us the name: the literary center of the Thirteen. It seemed a stroke of luck as well because it challenged
superstition. The initiative came from the students themselves, and it consisted simply in our meeting once a week to talk about literature, though in reality that was all we did in our free time, both in and out of school. Each of us brought his own writing, read it, and submitted it to the judgment of the
rest. Astounded by that example, I contributed the reading of sonnets that I had signed
with the pseudonym Javier Garcés, which I used not to distinguish myself but only to hide. They were simple technical exercises without inspiration or aspiration, to which I attributed no poetic value because they did not come from my soul. I had begun with imitations of Quevedo, Lope de Vega, and even García Lorca, whose octosyllables were so spontaneous that it was enough just to begin in order
to continue through inertia. I went so far in that fever of imitation that I set myself the task of parodying in order each of Garcilaso de la Vega’s forty sonnets. I also wrote ones that some students requested so they could claim them as their own when they gave them to their Sunday girlfriends. One of the girls, in absolute secrecy, was very moved when she read me the verses her suitor had dedicated
to her as if he had written them himself.

Carlos Martín gave us a small storeroom in the school’s second courtyard, its windows sealed for security. There were about five of us who would give ourselves assignments for the next meeting. None of them had set writing as a career, though it was not a question of that but of testing each person’s possibilities. We discussed the works of the other
members and began to anger one another as if the meetings were soccer matches. One day Ricardo González Ripoll had to leave in the middle of a debate and surprised the rector with his ear at the door, listening to the discussion. His curiosity was legitimate because it did not seem credible to him that we would dedicate our free hours to literature.

Toward the end of March we heard the news that
the former rector, Don Alejandro Ramos, had put a bullet through his head in the Parque Nacional in Bogotá. No one was willing to attribute this to his solitary and perhaps depressive character, and no one could find a reasonable motive for his committing suicide behind the monument to General Rafael Uribe Uribe, a fighter in four civil wars and a Liberal politician who was assassinated with an
ax by two fanatics in the atrium of the Capitolio. A delegation from the
liceo
headed by the
new rector attended the funeral of Maestro Alejandro Ramos, who remained in everyone’s memory as the farewell to another time.

Interest in national politics was rather thin at school. In my grandparents’ house I had heard it said too often that the only difference between the two parties after the War
of a Thousand Days was that the Liberals went to five o’clock Mass so that no one would see them and the Conservatives went to Mass at eight so that people would believe they were believers. Still, the real differences began to be felt again thirty years later, when the Conservative Party lost power and the first Liberal presidents tried to open the country to the new winds blowing in the world.
The Conservative Party, defeated by the rust of its absolute power, ordered and cleaned its own house under the distant brilliance of Mussolini in Italy and the dark shadows of General Franco in Spain, while the first administration of President Alfonso López Pumarejo, with a pleiad of well-educated young men, had tried to create the conditions for a modern liberalism, perhaps not realizing that he
was carrying out the historic fatalism of splitting us into the two halves into which the world was divided. It was unavoidable. In one of the books the teachers lent us I found a citation attributed to Lenin: “If you do not become involved in politics, politics will eventually become involved in you.”

But after forty-six years of a reactionary hegemony of Conservative presidents, peace began
to seem possible. Three young presidents with modern ways of thinking had opened a liberal perspective that seemed ready to dissipate the mists of the past. Alfonso López Pumarejo, the most notable of the three, and a bold reformer, was reelected in 1942 for a second term, and nothing seemed to disturb the rhythm of the changing of the guard. So that in my first year at the
liceo
we were absorbed
in the news of the European war, which kept us in suspense as national politics never had. Newspapers did not come into the school except in very special circumstances, because we were not in the habit of thinking about the press. Portable radios did not exist, and the only radio in the
liceo
was the old console in the teachers’ room that we played at full volume
at seven in the evening in order
to dance. We were far from thinking that the bloodiest and most turbulent of all our wars was incubating at that very moment.

Politics forced its way into the
liceo.
We divided into groups of Liberals and Conservatives, and for the first time we knew which side each person was on. An internal militancy arose, cordial and somewhat academic at first, but it degenerated into the same state of mind
that was beginning to rot the country. The first tensions at school were almost imperceptible, but no one doubted the good influence of Carlos Martín at the head of a faculty of teachers who had never hidden their ideologies. If the new rector was not an obvious militant, he at least authorized listening to the evening news on the radio in the teachers’ room, and from then on political news prevailed
over dance music. It was said without confirmation that in his office he had a portrait either of Lenin or of Marx.

The only threat of riot that ever took place at the
liceo
must have been the fruit of that rarefied atmosphere. In the dormitory pillows and shoes flew to the detriment of reading and sleep. I have not been able to establish the motive, but I think I remember—and several classmates
agree with me—that it was because of an episode in the book being read aloud that night:
Cantaclaro,
by Rómulo Gallegos. A strange call to combat.

Summoned for an emergency, Carlos Martín came into the dormitory and walked from one end to the other several times in the immense silence caused by his appearance. Then, in an attack of authoritarianism unusual in a character like his, he ordered
us to leave the dormitory in pajamas and slippers and assemble in the icy courtyard. There he delivered an oration in the circular style of Catiline, and we returned in perfect order and went back to sleep. It was the only incident of the kind that I can remember in our years at the
liceo.

Mario Convers, a student who had entered the sixth-year class that year, kept us in a state of excitement
with the idea of creating a newspaper different from the conventional ones in other schools. One of his first contacts was with me, and he seemed so convincing that I agreed, flattered but with no clear idea of my function, to be his editor-in-chief. Final preparations
for the paper coincided with the arrest of President López Pumarejo on July 8, 1944, by a group of high-ranking officers in the
Armed Forces, while he was on an official visit in the south of the country. The story, as he himself recounted it, was spare and to the point. Perhaps without intending to, he had told a stupendous tale to the investigators, according to which he had not known what had happened until he was freed. It was so close to the truths of real life that the Pasto coup became one more of many absurd episodes
in our national history.

Alberto Lleras Camargo, in his position as first deputy, lulled the country with his perfect voice and diction for several hours on Radio Nacional until President López was freed and order was reestablished. But rigorous martial law, with censorship of the press, was imposed. The prognosis was uncertain. The Conservatives had governed the country from the time of our
independence from Spain, in 1830, until the election of Olaya Herrera a century later, and they still gave no sign of liberalizing. The Liberals, on the other hand, were becoming more and more conservative in a country that was leaving scraps of itself behind in its history. At that moment they had an elite of young intellectuals fascinated by the lure of power, whose most radical and viable example
was Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. He had been one of the heroes of my childhood because of his actions against repression in the banana zone, which I had heard about, without understanding them, ever since I gained the use of my reason. My grandmother admired him, but I believe she was concerned by his similarities at the time to the Communists. I had stood behind him when he gave a thundering speech from
a balcony overlooking the square in Zipaquirá, and I was struck by his melon-shaped skull, the straight coarse hair and complexion of a pure Indian, his booming voice with its accent of the street urchins in Bogotá, perhaps exaggerated for political reasons. In his speech he did not talk about Liberals and Conservatives or the exploiters and the exploited, like everyone else, but about the poor
and the oligarchs, a word I heard then for the first time as it was hammered into every sentence, and I hurried to look it up in the dictionary.

He was a distinguished lawyer, an outstanding pupil in Rome of the great Italian penologist Enrico Ferri. He had studied the oratorical arts of Mussolini there, and on the rostrum he had something of his theatrical style. Gabriel Turbay, his rival in
the party, was an educated and elegant physician, with thin gold-rimmed glasses that gave him a certain air of a movie actor. At a recent Communist Party congress he had delivered an unexpected speech that surprised many and disturbed some of his middle-class party colleagues, but he did not believe he was contradicting by word or deed either his liberal formation or his aristocratic vocation. His
familiarity with Russian diplomacy dated from 1936, when in his role as Colombian ambassador to Italy he established relations in Rome with the Soviet Union. Seven years later he formalized them in Washington as Colombian minister to the United States.

His relations with the Soviet embassy in Bogotá were very cordial, and he had some friends in the leadership of the Colombian Communist Party
who would have been able to establish an electoral alliance with the Liberals, something often talked about in those days but never realized. During that period as well, when he was ambassador in Washington, an insistent rumor circulated in Colombia that he was the secret lover of a great Hollywood star—perhaps Joan Crawford or Paulette Goddard—but he also never renounced his career as an uncorruptible
bachelor.