Living to Tell the Tale (30 page)

The supporters of Gaitán and of Turbay together could have formed a Liberal majority and opened new directions within the party itself, but neither of the two separate halves could defeat a united and armed Conservatism.

Our
Gaceta Literaria
appeared during those evil days. Even those of us who had already printed the first issue were surprised by its professional presentation as a
well-formatted and well-printed eight-page tabloid. Carlos Martín and Carlos Julio Calderón were the most enthusiastic, and during recreation periods both of them commented on some of the articles. The most important of them was one written by Carlos Martín at our request, in which he established the need for a courageous awareness of the struggle against those who peddled the
interests of the
state, the ambitious politicians and speculators who interfered with the free progress of the country. It was published with a large photograph of him on the first page. There was an article by Convers about Hispanicism, and a lyrical prose piece by me and signed Javier Garcés. Convers announced that his friends in Bogotá were very enthusiastic, and there were possibilities for subventions to launch
it on a large scale as an interscholastic paper.

The first issue had not yet been distributed when the Pasto coup took place. On the same day that a breakdown of public order was declared, the mayor of Zipaquirá burst into the
liceo
at the head of an armed squad and confiscated the copies we had ready for circulation. It was a cinematic assault, explainable only as the result of a calculated
denunciation that the newspaper contained subversive material. That same day notification came from the press office of the presidency of the Republic stating that the paper had been printed without undergoing the censorship required by martial law, and Carlos Martín was stripped of the rectorship with no prior notification.

For us it was a nonsensical decision that made us feel humiliated and
important at the same time. The print run was no more than two hundred copies, intended for distribution among friends, but they told us that the censorship requirement was unavoidable under martial law. Our license was canceled until the issuance of a new order that never arrived.

More than fifty years went by before Carlos Martín revealed to me, for these memoirs, the mysteries of that absurd
episode. On the day the
Gaceta
was confiscated, the same education minister who had appointed him—Antonio Rocha—called him to his office in Bogotá to request his resignation. Carlos Martín found him with a copy of the
Gaceta Literaria
in which numerous phrases considered subversive had been underlined in red pencil. The same had been done to his editorial, and the one by Mario Convers, and even
a poem by a known author that was suspected of being written in code. “Even the Bible underlined in that malicious way could express the opposite of its authentic meaning,” Carlos Martín told him with so much blatant fury that the minister threatened to call the police. He
was named publisher of the magazine
Sábado,
which for an intellectual like him should have been considered a stellar promotion.
But he always had the impression that he had been the victim of a right-wing conspiracy. He was the object of an attack in a Bogotá café that he almost repelled with a gun. A new minister later named him chief counsel of the judicial section, and he had a brilliant career that culminated in a retirement surrounded by books and memories in his oasis in Tarragona.

At the same time that Carlos Martín
was removed—with no connection to him, of course—an anonymous story made the rounds of the
liceo
and the houses and taverns of the city, according to which the war with Peru, in 1932, was a deception of the Liberal governor to stay in power despite the unrestrained opposition of the Conservatives. The story, which was even distributed on mimeographed sheets, claimed that the drama had begun without
the slightest political intention when a Peruvian second lieutenant crossed the Amazon River with a military patrol and on the Colombian side kidnapped the secret girlfriend of the intendant of Leticia, an exciting mulatta called Pila, a diminutive of Pilar. When the Colombian intendant discovered the abduction he crossed that natural frontier with a group of armed peons and rescued Pila on
Peruvian territory. But General Luis Sánchez Cerro, the dictator of Peru, took advantage of the dispute to invade Colombia and attempt to change the Amazonian boundaries in favor of his country.

Olaya Herrera—under the ferocious hounding of the Conservative Party that had been defeated after half a century of absolute rule—declared a state of war, established a national mobilization, purged the
army and put in men he trusted, and sent troops to liberate the territories violated by the Peruvians. A battle cry shook the country and fired our childhood: “Long live Colombia, down with Peru!” In the paroxysm of the war the rumor circulated that civilian airplanes from SCADTA were militarized and armed as fighting squadrons, and that one of them, lacking bombs, dispersed a Holy Week procession
in the Peruvian town of Guepí with a bombardment of coconuts.
The great writer Juan Lozano y Lozano, called upon by President Olaya to keep him informed of the truth in a war of reciprocal lies, wrote the truth of the incident in his masterful prose, but the false version was considered valid for a long time.

General Sánchez Cerro, of course, found a golden opportunity in the war to strengthen
his iron regime. For his part, Olaya Herrera named as commander of the Colombian forces a Conservative general, Alfredo Vásquez Cobo, who happened to be in Paris. The general crossed the Atlantic in an armed ship and penetrated the mouths of the Amazon River all the way to Leticia, when the diplomats on both sides had already begun to extinguish the war.

With no connection at all to the Pasto
coup or the incident of the newspaper, Carlos Martín was replaced as rector by Oscar Espitia Brand, a career educator and eminent physicist. The appointment aroused all kinds of suspicions in the school. I was shaken by reservations about him from our first greeting because of the absolute astonishment with which he stared at my poet’s mane and untamed mustache. He had a hard face, and he looked
straight into your eyes with a severe expression. The news that he would be our teacher of organic chemistry made my fear complete.

One Saturday during that year we were at the movies, in the middle of an evening show, when an agitated voice announced over the loudspeakers that a student at the
liceo
had died. This made so great an impression that I have not been able to remember what film we
were watching, but I never forgot the intensity of Claudette Colbert about to throw herself into a torrential river from the railing of a bridge. The dead student, seventeen years old, was in the second year and had just arrived from his remote city of Pasto, near the border with Ecuador. He had suffered respiratory failure in the course of a run organized by the gym teacher as a weekend penance
for his lazy students. It was the only instance of a student dying for any reason during my stay, and it caused great consternation not only in the
liceo
but in the city as well. My classmates chose me to say a few words of farewell at the funeral. That same night I requested an appointment with the new rector in order to show
him my speech, and going into his office shook me like a supernatural
repetition of the only interview I’d had with the late rector. Maestro Espitia read my manuscript with a tragic expression, and he approved it without comment, but when I stood to leave he indicated that I should sit down again. He had read notes and verses of mine, some of the many that circulated in secret during recreational periods, and he had thought a few of them deserved to be published
in a literary supplement. I was just attempting to overcome my pitiless timidity when he expressed what was beyond a doubt his real purpose. He advised me to cut my poet’s curls, inappropriate in a serious man, trim my bushy mustache, and stop wearing shirts with birds and flowers on them that were better suited to Carnival. I never expected anything like that, and to my good fortune I was too nervous
to respond with an impertinence. He noticed this and adopted a sacramental tone to explain his fear that my style would be adopted by the younger students because of my reputation as a poet. I left the office affected by the recognition of my poetic customs and talent at so high a level, and disposed to satisfy the rector with a change in my appearance for so solemn a ceremony. To the point where
I interpreted as a personal failure the cancellation of posthumous tributes at the request of the boy’s family.

The ending was sinister. When the casket was on view in the school library, someone discovered that the glass looked foggy. Álvaro Ruiz Torres opened the casket at the request of the family and confirmed that it was, in fact, damp inside. Searching by touch for the cause of vapor in
a sealed coffin, he applied light pressure to the chest with his fingertips and the corpse emitted a heartrending lament. The family was horrified at the idea that he was alive until the doctor explained that the lungs had retained air because of respiratory failure and had expelled it with pressure on the chest. Despite the simplicity of the diagnosis, or perhaps for that very reason, some were
still afraid he had been buried alive. In that frame of mind, I left for my fourth-year vacation, longing to soften up my parents so I would not have to go on with my studies.

I disembarked in Sucre under an invisible drizzle. The
retaining wall at the port seemed different from the one in my memory. The square was smaller and barer than I recalled, and the church and promenade had a forsaken
light under the pruned almond trees. The colored wreaths on the streets announced Christmas, but this did not awaken in me the emotion it once had, and I did not recognize any of the handful of men with umbrellas waiting on the dock, until one of them said as I passed, in an unmistakable accent and tone:

“What’s the story?”

It was my papá, somewhat worn and pale from loss of weight. He was not
wearing the white linen suit that had identified him from a distance ever since he was a young man, but a pair of house trousers, a short-sleeved tropical shirt, and a strange overseer’s hat. He was accompanied by my brother Gustavo, whom I did not recognize because of his nine-year-old growth spurt.

It was fortunate that the family had retained the enterprising spirit of the poor, and the early
supper seemed to have been prepared with the intention of letting me know that this was my house and there was no other. The good news at the table was that my sister Ligia had won the lottery. The story—which she told herself—began when our mother dreamed that her papá had fired a gun into the air to frighten away a thief he caught robbing the old house in Aracataca. My mother recounted the dream
at breakfast, following a family custom, and suggested that they buy a lottery ticket ending in seven, because the number had the same shape as my grandfather’s revolver. Their luck failed with a ticket my mother bought on credit, planning to pay for it with the prize money. But Ligia, who was eleven at the time, asked Papá for thirty centavos to pay for the ticket that did not win, and another
thirty so that the following week she could play the same peculiar number again: 0207.

Our brother Luis Enrique hid the ticket to frighten Ligia, but his fright was greater the following Monday, when he heard her come into the house shouting like a madwoman that she had won the lottery. In his haste to do his mischief, our brother forgot where the ticket was, and in the confusion of the search,
they had to empty closets and trunks and turn the
house upside down from the living room to the toilets. But most disquieting of all was the cabalistic amount of the prize: 770 pesos.

The bad news was that my parents had at last realized their dream of sending Luis Enrique to the Fontidueño Reformatory in Medellín, convinced it was a school for disobedient children and not what it was in reality:
a prison for the rehabilitation of very dangerous juvenile delinquents.

Papá made the final decision when he sent his wayward son to collect a bill owed to the pharmacy, and instead of handing over the eight pesos that they paid him, he bought a good-quality
tiple
that he learned to play like a master. My father made no comment when he discovered the instrument in the house, and he continued
asking his son to collect the debt, but he always answered that the shopkeeper did not have the money to pay. Some two months had gone by when Luis Enrique found Papá accompanying himself on the
tiple
as he sang an improvised song: “Look at me, here I am, playing a
tiple
that cost me eight pesos.”

We never found out how Papá had learned its origin, or why he had pretended to ignore his son’s
shabby trick, but the boy disappeared from the house until my mother had calmed her husband. That was when we heard Papá’s first threats to send Luis Enrique to the reformatory in Medellín, but no one paid attention to him, for he had also announced his intention to send me to the seminary at Ocaña, not to punish me for anything but for the honor of having a priest in the house, and it took him longer
to conceive the idea than to forget it. The
tiple,
however, was the last straw.

Admission to the house of correction was possible only by the decision of a judge for juveniles, but Papá overcame the lack of this requirement with a letter of recommendation from the archbishop of Medellín, Monsignor García Benítez, obtained through the mediation of mutual friends. Luis Enrique, for his part, gave
yet another demonstration of his good nature and allowed himself to be taken away, as jubilant as if he were going to a party.

Vacation without him was not the same. He could accompany
Filadelfo Velilla, the magical tailor and masterful
tiple
player, like a professional, and Maestro Valdés, of course. It was easy. When we left those rousing dances of the rich, flocks of furtive apprentice birds
would assail us in the shadows of the park with all kinds of temptations. By mistake I proposed to one who passed close by, but who was not one of them, that she come with me, and she responded with exemplary logic that she could not because her husband was sleeping at home. But two nights later she told me she would leave the street door unbarred three times a week so I could come in without knocking
when her husband was not there.