Living to Tell the Tale (50 page)

“It’s books!”

My heart leaped up before I did. In fact they were books, with no clue as to the sender, packed
by a master hand up to the top of the crate, and there was a letter difficult to decipher because of the hieroglyphic calligraphy and hermetic lyrics of Germán Vargas: “This thing’s for you, Maestro, let’s see if you learn something at last.” It was also signed by Alfonso Fuenmayor, and a scrawl that I identified as belonging to Don Ramón Vinyes, whom I did not know yet. The only thing they
recommended was not to commit any plagiarism that would be too obvious. Inside one of the books by Faulkner there was a note from Álvaro Cepeda, written in his difficult hand and in great haste besides, in which he said that the following week he was leaving for a year to pursue a special course of study at the School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York.

The first thing I did was
to display the books on the table in the dining room while my mother finished clearing away the breakfast dishes. She had to arm herself with a broom to chase away her younger children, who wanted to cut out the illustrations with the pruning shears, and the street dogs that sniffed at the books as if they were something to eat. I smelled them too, as I always do with every new book, and I looked
over all of them at random, reading paragraphs in a haphazard way. I moved from place to place that night because I was too restless, or the dim light in the corridor to the courtyard faded, and at dawn my back had cramped and I still did not have the remotest idea of the benefit I could derive from that miracle.

There were twenty-three distinguished works by contemporary authors, all of them
in Spanish and selected with the evident intention that they be read for the sole purpose of learning to write. And in translations as recent as William Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury.
Fifty years later it is impossible for me to recall the entire list, and the three eternal friends who knew it are no longer here to remember. I had read only two of them:
Mrs. Dalloway,
by Mrs. Woolf, and
Point
Counter Point,
by Aldous Huxley. The ones I remember best were those by William Faulkner:
The Hamlet, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying,
and
The Wild Palms.
Also
Manhattan Transfer
and perhaps another by John Dos Passos;
Orlando,
by Virginia Woolf; John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
and
The Grapes of Wrath; Portrait of Jenny,
by Robert Nathan, and
Tobacco Road,
by Erskine Caldwell. Among the
titles I do not remember at a distance of half a century, there was at least one by Hemingway, perhaps a book of short stories, which was the work of his the three in Barranquilla liked best; another by Jorge Luis Borges, no doubt stories as well, and perhaps another by Felisberto Hernández, the extraordinary Uruguayan storyteller my friends had just discovered with shouts of joy. I read them all
in the months that followed, some of them well and others less so, and thanks to them I managed to get out of the creative limbo where I was foundering.

Because of the pneumonia I was forbidden to smoke, but I smoked in the bathroom as if hiding from myself. The doctor knew and spoke to me with real seriousness, but I could not obey him. Already in Sucre, as I tried to read without pause the
books I had received, I chain-smoked until I could not bear it, and the more I tried to quit the more I smoked. I smoked four packs a day, I would interrupt meals to smoke, and I burned the sheets because I fell asleep holding a lit cigarette. The fear of death would wake me at any hour of the night, and only by smoking could I endure it, until I decided I would rather die than stop smoking.

More than twenty years later, when I was married and had children, I was still smoking. A doctor who saw my lungs on the screen told me in horror that in two or three years I would not
be able to breathe. Terrified, I reached the extreme of sitting for hours and hours without doing anything because I could not read, or listen to music, or talk to friends or enemies without smoking. One night, during
a casual supper in Barcelona, a friend who was a psychiatrist explained to the others that tobacco was perhaps the most difficult addiction to break. I dared ask him what the fundamental reason was, and his reply had a chilling simplicity:

“Because for you, quitting smoking would be like killing someone you love.”

It was a sudden burst of clairvoyance. I never knew why and did not want to know,
but I put out the cigarette I had just lit in the ashtray, and with no anxiety or regret I never smoked another one again in my life.

My other addiction was no less persistent. One afternoon a maid from the house next door came in, and after talking to everyone she went to the terrace and with great respect asked permission to speak with me. I did not stop reading until she asked:

“Do you remember
Matilde?”

I did not remember, but she did not believe me.

“Don’t play the fool, Señor Gabito,” she said with deliberate emphasis. “Ni-gro-man-ta.”

And with reason: Nigromanta was now a free woman, with a child by the dead policeman, and she lived alone in the same house as her mother and other members of the family, but in a bedroom that was set apart, with its own door out to the back end
of the cemetery. I went to see her, and our reencounter went on for more than a month. Each time I delayed my return to Cartagena and wanted to stay in Sucre forever. Until one dawn when I was caught by surprise in her house by a storm with thunder and lightning like the one on the night of Russian roulette. I tried to stay under the eaves, but when I no longer could I plunged into the middle of the
street with the water up to my knees. It was my good luck that my mother was alone in the kitchen and took me to my bedroom along the garden paths so that Papá would not hear. As soon as she helped me take off my dripping wet shirt, she held it at arm’s length with
the tips of her thumb and index finger and tossed it into the corner with a shudder of disgust.

“You were with that woman,” she said.

I turned to stone.

“How do you know that?”

“Because it’s the same odor as the other time,” she said, her face impassive. “It’s just as well her man is dead.”

I was surprised by this lack of compassion for the first time in her life. She must have noticed, because she drove the point home without thinking about it.

“It’s the only death that made me glad when I heard about it.”

I asked in perplexity:

“How did you know who she is?”

“Oh, son,” she said with a sigh, “God tells me everything about all of you.”

Then she helped me take off my dripping trousers and tossed them in the corner with the rest of the clothes. “All of you are going to be just like your papá,” she said without warning, heaving a deep sigh, while she dried my back with a burlap towel. And she finished with all her heart:

“God willing, you’ll also be husbands as good as he is.”

The dramatic treatments to which my mother subjected me must have had the desired effect of forestalling a recurrence of pneumonia. Until I realized that she herself complicated them in order to keep me from returning to the thunder-and-lightning bed of Nigromanta, whom I never saw again.

I returned to Cartagena restored and happy, with
the news that I was writing
La casa,
and I talked about it as if it were an accomplished fact after I had just begun the first chapter. Zabala and Héctor greeted me like the prodigal son. At the university, my good teachers seemed resigned to accepting me as I was. At the same time I continued to write very occasional pieces that were paid by the job at
El Universal.
My career as a short-story
writer continued with the little I managed to write, almost to please Maestro Zabala: “Dialogue of the Mirror” and “Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers,” published by
El Espectador.
Although in both of them there was an evident lightening
of the primary rhetoric of the first four stories, I still was not out of the swamp.

By this time Cartagena was infected by the political tension in the rest
of the country, which should have been considered as an omen that something serious was going to happen. At the end of the year the Liberals declared their abstention from the entire election because of the savagery of the political persecution, but they did not renounce their underground plans to overthrow the government. The violence grew worse in the countryside and people fled to the cities, but
censorship obliged the press to write about this in an oblique manner. It was common knowledge, however, that fugitive Liberals had organized guerrilla bands in different parts of the country. In the eastern Llanos—an immense ocean of green pastureland that occupies more than a quarter of the national territory—they had become legendary. Their general commander, Guadalupe Salcedo, was already viewed
as a mythic figure, even by the army, and his photographs were distributed in secret and copied by the hundreds, and candles were lit to them on altars.

The De la Espriella family appeared to know more than they said, and in their walled enclosure they spoke with complete naturalness about an imminent coup against the Conservative regime. I did not know the details, but Maestro Zabala had warned
me that as soon as I noticed any disturbance in the street I should go straight to the newspaper. You could touch the tension with your hands when I walked into the Americana ice cream parlor at three in the afternoon to keep an appointment. I sat down to read at a back table as someone approached, and one of my old classmates, with whom I had never talked about politics, said as he passed by
without looking at me:

“Get to the paper, the thing’s about to begin.”

I did just the opposite: I wanted to know how things turned out right in the center of the city and not behind the closed doors of the newsroom. Minutes later a press officer in the Gobernación, whom I knew well, sat down at my table, and I did not think he had been ordered to neutralize me. I talked to him for half an hour
in the purest state of innocence, and when
he stood to leave I discovered that the enormous room in the ice cream parlor had emptied out without my realizing it. He followed my glance and confirmed the hour: ten past one.

“Don’t worry,” he said with controlled relief. “Nothing happened.”

In fact, the most important group of Liberal leaders, desperate because of the official violence, had come
to an agreement with democratic military men of the highest rank to end the slaughter that had been unleashed throughout the country by the Conservative regime, which was prepared to remain in power at any price. Most of them had participated in the steps taken on April 9 to achieve peace through an agreement with President Ospina Pérez, and less than twenty months later they realized too late that
they had been victims of a colossal deception. The frustrated action that day had been authorized by the president of the Liberal leadership, Carlos Lleras Restrepo, through Plinio Mendoza Neira, who had excellent relations within the Armed Forces since he had been minister of war under the Liberal government. The action coordinated by Mendoza Neira, with the secret collaboration of prominent
party members all over the country, was supposed to begin at dawn that day with the bombing of the Palacio Presidencial by planes from the air force. The movement was supported by the naval bases at Cartagena and Apiay, by most of the military garrisons in the country, and by trade unions determined to seize power for a civilian government of national reconciliation.

Only after the failure was
it learned that two days before the anticipated date of the action, the former president Eduardo Santos had brought together the high Liberal officials and the leaders of the coup for a final review of the project in his house in Bogotá. In the midst of the debate, someone asked the ritual question:

“Will there be bloodshed?”

No one was ingenuous enough or cynical enough to say no. Other leaders
explained that maximum measures had been taken to avoid it, but no magical formulas existed for preventing the unforeseen. Frightened by the extent of their own conspiracy,
the Liberal leadership issued the counterorder without discussion. Many of those who were involved but did not receive the order in time were arrested or killed during the attempt. Others advised Mendoza to continue alone until
the power takeover, and he did not for reasons more ethical than political, but he did not have the time or the means to warn all those involved. He managed to take refuge in the embassy of Venezuela, and he lived in exile for four years in Caracas, safe from a court-martial that sentenced him in absentia to twenty-five years in prison for sedition. Fifty-two years later my hand does not tremble
when I write—without his authorization—that he repented for the rest of his life, in his exile in Caracas, because of the devastating balance left by Conservatism in power: no less than three hundred thousand dead.

For me as well, in a certain sense, this was a crucial moment. In less than two months I had failed the third year at the faculty of law and ended my commitment to
El Universal,
for
I did not see my future in either one. My pretext was to free my time for the novel I had just begun, though in the depths of my soul I knew it was neither true nor a lie; instead, the project had revealed itself to me without warning as a rhetorical formula, with very little of the good that I had known how to use from Faulkner and all the bad of my inexperience. I soon learned that telling stories
parallel to the ones you are writing—without revealing their essence—is a valuable part of the conception and the writing. This, however, was not the case at the time, but for lack of something to show I had invented a spoken novel to entertain my listeners and deceive myself.

That awareness obliged me to rethink, from beginning to end, the project that never had more than forty pages written
in fits and starts and yet was cited in magazines and newspapers—and by me as well—and imaginative readers even published some very smart advance reviews. At bottom, the reason for this custom of recounting parallel projects deserves not reproaches but compassion: the terror of writing can be as intolerable as the terror of not writing. In my case, moreover, I am convinced that telling the real story
brings bad luck. It comforts me, however,
that at times the oral account might be better than the written one, and without realizing it we may be inventing a new genre that literature needs now: the fiction of fiction.