Living to Tell the Tale (35 page)

The night before the last final
exam of the year, Guillermo López Guerra and I had an unfortunate incident with Professor Gonzalo Ocampo because of a drunken fight. José Palencia had invited us to study in his hotel room, which was a colonial jewel with an idyllic view of the park in flower and the cathedral in the background. Since we had only one last exam, we stayed there until dark and returned to school by way of our poor
men’s taverns. Professor Ocampo, on duty as prefect of discipline, reprimanded us on account of the hour and the state we were in, and the two of us in chorus crowned him with curses. His furious reaction and our shouts disturbed the dormitory.

The decision of the faculty was that López Guerra and I could not sit for the only final examination we still had to take. In other words: that year,
at least, we would not hold baccalaureate degrees. We never could find out about the secret negotiations among the teachers, because they closed ranks with insurmountable solidarity. Rector Espitia must have assumed responsibility for the problem, and he arranged for us to take the exam at the Ministry of Education in Bogotá. Which we
did. Espitia himself accompanied us, and stayed with us while
we answered the written examination, which was graded on the spot. We did very well.

It must have been a very complicated internal situation, because Ocampo did not attend the final ceremony, perhaps because of Espitia’s easy solution and our excellent grades. And, in the end, because of my personal successes, for as a special prize I was awarded an unforgettable book: Diógenes Laercio’s
Lives
of Famous Philosophers.
It not only was more than my parents expected, but I was also the first in that year’s class, though my classmates—and I more than anyone—knew I was not the best.

I
NEVER IMAGINED
that nine months after receiving the baccalaureate I would have my first story published in
Fin de Semana,
the literary supplement of
El Espectador
in Bogotá, and the most interesting and demanding of the time. Forty-two days later the
second story was published. The most surprising thing for me, however, was a dedicatory note by the deputy editor of the paper and the editor of the supplement, Eduardo Zalamea Borda (Ulises), the most lucid Colombian critic at the time, and the one most alert to the appearance of new values.

The process was so unexpected that it is not easy to recount. At the beginning of the year I had matriculated
in the faculty of law at the Universidad Nacional of Bogotá, as my parents and I had agreed. I lived in the very center of the city, in a
pensión
on Calle Florián, occupied for the most part by students from the Atlantic coast. On free afternoons, instead of working to support myself, I stayed in my room to read or went to the cafés that permitted it. They were books I obtained by chance and luck,
and they depended more on chance than on any luck of mine, because the friends who could buy them lent them to me for such limited periods that I stayed awake for nights on end in order to return them on time. But unlike the ones I read at the
liceo
in Zipaquirá, which deserved to be in a mausoleum of
consecrated authors, we read these like bread warm from the oven, printed in Buenos Aires in
new translations after the long hiatus in publishing because of the Second World War. In this way I discovered, to my good fortune, the already very-much-discovered Jorge Luis Borges, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and Gilbert Chesterton, William Irish and Katherine Mansfield, and many others.

These new works were displayed in the unreachable windows of bookstores, but some copies
circulated in the student cafés, which were active centers of cultural dissemination for university students from the provinces. Many of them had their places reserved year after year and received mail and even postal money orders there. Some favors from the owners, or their trusted employees, were decisive in saving a good many university careers. Numerous professionals in the country may owe
more to them than to their invisible tutors.

I preferred El Molino, the café frequented by older poets, only some two hundred meters from my
pensión
and on the crucial corner of Avenida Jiménez de Quesada and Carrera Séptima. They did not allow students a fixed table, but you could be sure of learning more and learning it better than in textbooks from the literary conversations we listened to
as we huddled at nearby tables. It was an enormous café, well turned out in the Spanish style, and its walls had been decorated by the painter Santiago Martínez Delgado with episodes from the battle of Don Quixote against the windmills. Although I did not have a reserved place, I always arranged for the waiters to put me as close as possible to the great master León de Greiff—bearded, gruff, charming—who
would begin his
tertulia
^*
at dusk with some of the most famous writers of the day, and end it with his chess students at midnight, awash in cheap liquor. Very few of the great names in the country’s arts and letters did not sit at that table, and we played dead at ours in order not to miss a single word. Although they tended to talk
more about women or political intrigues than about their art
or work, they always said something new for us to learn. The most attentive of us were from the Atlantic coast, united less by Caribbean conspiracies against the Cachacos than by the vice of books. One day Jorge Álvaro Espinosa, a law student who had taught me to navigate the Bible and made me learn by heart the complete names of Job’s companions, placed an awesome tome on the table in front of me
and declared with his bishop’s authority:

“This is the other Bible.”

It was, of course, James Joyce’s
Ulysses,
which I read in bits and pieces and fits and starts until I lost all patience. It was premature brashness. Years later, as a docile adult, I set myself the task of reading it again in a serious way, and it not only was the discovery of a genuine world that I never suspected inside me,
but it also provided invaluable technical help to me in freeing language and in handling time and structures in my books.

One of my roommates was Domingo Manuel Vega, a medical student who had been my friend ever since Sucre and who shared my voracity in reading. Another was my cousin Nicolás Ricardo, the oldest son of my uncle Juan de Dios, who kept alive for me the virtues of the family. One
night Vega came in with three books he had just bought, and he lent me one chosen at random, as he often did to help me sleep. But this time the effect was just the opposite: I never again slept with my former serenity. The book was Franz Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis,
in the false translation by Borges published by Losada in Buenos Aires, that determined a new direction for my life from its first
line, which today is one of the great devices in world literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” These were mysterious books whose dangerous precipices were not only different from but often contrary to everything I had known until then. It was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author
to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice. It was Scheherazade all over
again, not in her millenary world where everything was possible but in another irreparable world where everything had already been lost.

When I finished reading
The Metamorphosis
I felt an irresistible longing to live in that alien paradise.
The new day found me at the portable typewriter that Domingo Manuel Vega had lent me, attempting to write something that would resemble Kafka’s poor bureaucrat changed into an enormous cockroach. In the days that followed, I did not go to the university for fear the spell would be broken, and I continued sweating drops of envy until Eduardo Zalamea Borda published in his pages a disconsolate commentary
lamenting the fact that the new generation of Colombian writers lacked memorable names, and that nothing could be detected in the future that might remedy the situation. I do not know with what right I felt challenged, in the name of my generation, by the provocation in that commentary, but I took up the abandoned story again in an attempt at rectification. I elaborated the plot idea of the
conscious corpse in
The Metamorphosis
but relieved it of its false mysteries and ontological prejudices.

In any event, I felt so uncertain I did not dare talk it over with any of my tablemates. Not even with Gonzalo Mallarino, my fellow student at the faculty of law, who was the only reader of the lyrical prose pieces that I wrote to endure the tedium of my classes. I reread and corrected my
story until I was exhausted, and at last I wrote a personal note to Eduardo Zalamea—whom I had never seen—of which I cannot recall even a single letter. I put everything in an envelope and brought it in person to reception at
El Espectador.
The concierge authorized me to go up to the second floor to hand the letter to Zalamea himself, but the mere idea paralyzed me. I left the envelope on the
concierge’s desk and fled.

This happened on a Tuesday, and I was not troubled by any presentiments regarding the fate of my story, but I was certain that in the event it was published, it would not happen very soon. In the meantime, for two weeks I rambled and roamed from café to café to allay my Saturday-afternoon apprehension until September 13, when I went into El Molino and collided
with
the title of my story printed across the full width of
El Espectador,
which had just come out: “The Third Resignation.”

My first reaction was the devastating certainty that I did not have the five centavos to buy the paper. This was the most explicit symbol of my poverty, because many basic things in daily life, in addition to the newspaper, cost five centavos: the trolley, the public telephone,
a cup of coffee, a shoeshine. I rushed out to the street with no protection against the imperturbable drizzle, but in the nearby cafés there was no one I knew to give me a charitable coin. And I did not find anyone in the
pensión
at that dead hour on Saturday except the landlady, which was the same as not finding anyone because I owed her seven hundred twenty times five centavos for two months
of room and board. When I went out again, prepared for anything, I encountered a man who came from Divine Providence and was getting out of a cab, holding
El Espectador
in his hand, and I asked him straight out if he would give it to me.

And so I could read my first story in print, with an illustration by Hernán Merino, the official sketch artist for the paper. I read it hiding in my room, my
heart pounding, in a single breath. In each line I was discovering the crushing power of print, for what I had constructed with so much love and pain as a humble parody of a universal genius was revealed to me as an obscure and weak monologue barely sustained by three or four consolatory sentences. Almost twenty years had to go by before I dared read it a second time, and my judgment then—not tempered
by compassion—was much less indulgent.

The most difficult thing was the avalanche of glowing friends who invaded my room with copies of the newspaper and unrestrained praises for a story I was certain they had not understood. Among my fellow students at the university, some appreciated it, others had less understanding, still others with more reason did not go past the fourth line, but Gonzalo
Mallarino, whose literary judgment it was not easy for me to place in doubt, approved it without reservation.

My greatest uneasiness had to do with the verdict of Jorge Álvaro Espinosa, whose critical blade was the most dangerous even beyond our immediate circle. I had contradictory feelings:
I wanted to see him right away to resolve my uncertainty once and for all, but at the same time the idea
of facing him terrified me. He disappeared until Tuesday, which was not strange in an insatiable reader, and when he reappeared in El Molino he began talking to me not about the story but about my audacity.

“I suppose you realize the trouble you’ve gotten into,” he said to me, fixing his green king-cobra eyes on mine. “Now you’re in the showcase of recognized writers, and there’s a lot you have
to do to deserve it.”

I was petrified by the only opinion that could affect me as much as that of Ulises. But before he finished, I had decided to move ahead of him with what I considered then, and always considered since, to be the truth:

“That story is a piece of shit.”

He replied with immutable control that he could not say anything yet because he had only had time to glance at it. But he
explained that even if it was as bad as I said, it was not bad enough to sacrifice the golden opportunity that life was offering me.

“In any case, that story already belongs to the past,” he concluded. “What matters now is the next one.”

He left me flabbergasted. I was foolish enough to look for contrary arguments until I became convinced I was not going to hear advice more intelligent than
his. He expounded on his fixed idea that you first had to conceive of the story and then the style, but one depended on the other in a mutual servitude that was the magic wand of the classics. He spent some time on his opinion, repeated so often, that I needed to read the Greeks in a profound, unbiased way, and not only Homer, the only one I had read for the baccalaureate because I was obliged to.
I promised I would, and I wanted to hear other names, but he changed the subject and began to talk about André Gide’s
The Counterfeiters,
which he had read that weekend. I never found the courage to tell him that perhaps our conversation had determined my life. I stayed up all night making notes for the next story, which would not have the meanders of the first one.

I suspected that those who
talked to me about it were impressed not so much by the story—which perhaps they had
not read and certainly had not understood—as by its being published in an unusual display on so important a page. To begin with, I realized that my two great defects were the two greatest defects: the clumsiness of my writing and my ignorance of the human heart. And they were more than evident in my first story,
which was a confused, abstract meditation made worse by my abuse of invented emotions.

Searching my memory for situations from real life for the second story, I remembered that one of the most beautiful women I had known as a child told me that she wished she could be inside the very handsome cat that she was caressing on her lap. I asked her why, and she answered: “Because it is more beautiful
than I am.” Then I had a point of departure for the second story, and an attractive title: “Eva Is Inside Her Cat.” The rest, as in the previous story, was invented out of nothing, and for the same reason—as we liked to say in those days—both carried within them the seeds of their own destruction.