Living to Tell the Tale (51 page)

The real truth is that I did not know how to go on living. My convalescence in Sucre allowed me to realize that I did not know where I was going in life, but it gave me no clues
as to the right direction or any new argument for convincing my parents that they would not die if I took the liberty of deciding that for myself. So I went to Barranquilla with two hundred pesos from her household funds that my mother had given me before I returned to Cartagena.

On December 15, 1949, I walked into the Librería Mundo at five in the afternoon to wait for the friends I had not
seen since our night in May when I had left with the unforgettable Señor Razzore. I had only a small beach bag with another change of clothing, some books, and the leather briefcase with my rough drafts. Minutes after I arrived all of them came into the bookstore, one behind the other. It was a noisy welcome, without Álvaro Cepeda, who was still in New York. When the group was complete we moved on
to drinks, which no longer were in the Café Colombia next to the bookstore but in a new one with closer friends across the street: Café Japy.

I had no destination, not that night and not ever in my life. The strange thing is that I never thought my destination could be Barranquilla, and if I went there it was only to talk about literature and to thank them in person for the shipment of books
they had sent me in Sucre. We had more than enough of the first but nothing of the second, though I tried many times, because the group had a sacramental terror of the custom of giving or receiving thanks among ourselves.

That night Germán Vargas improvised a meal for twelve people, who ran the gamut from journalists, painters, and notaries to the governor of the department, a typical Barranquillan
Conservative with his own way of perceiving and governing. Most of them left after midnight, and the rest drifted away until only Alfonso, Germán, and I were left, along with the governor, more or less in the right mind we tended to be in at the dawns of our adolescence.

In that night’s long conversations I received a surprising lesson from him on the nature of those who governed the city during
the blood-soaked years. He calculated that in all the destruction of that barbarous policy, the most devastating aspect was the impressive number of refugees without housing or food in the cities.

“At this rate,” he concluded, “my party, with the help of weapons, will have no adversary in the next elections and will be in absolute control of power.”

The only exception was Barranquilla, in accordance
with a culture of political coexistence that the local Conservatives themselves took part in and that had made the city a refuge of peace in the eye of the hurricane. I tried to make an ethical observation, but he stopped me cold with a gesture of his hand.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but this does not mean we are on the margins of national life. On the contrary: because of our peacefulness, the social
drama of the country has come tiptoeing in through the back door, and now we have it here inside.”

Then I learned that there were some five thousand refugees who had come from the interior in the worst misery, and no one knew how to rehabilitate them or where to hide them so that the problem would not become public. For the first time in the history of the city there were military patrols guarding
critical locations, and everyone saw them but the government denied it and the censorship kept it from being denounced in the press.

At dawn, after almost dragging the distinguished governor home, we went to the Chop Suey, the breakfast spot for great all-nighters. At the kiosk on the corner Alfonso bought three copies of
El Heraldo,
whose editorial page had a note signed by Puck, his pseudonym
for the column that appeared every other day. It was only a greeting for me, but Germán kidded him because the note said I was there on an informal vacation.

“The best thing would have been to say that he’s going to live here so you wouldn’t have to write a greeting and then a farewell,” joked Germán. “Less expensive for a paper as cheap as
El Heraldo.
”

Serious now, Alfonso thought his editorial
section could use
another columnist. But Germán was indomitable in the light of the dawn.

“He’ll be a fifth columnist because you already have four.”

Neither one consulted with me as I wanted them to so that I could say yes. The subject was not spoken of again. It was not really necessary, because that night Alfonso told me he had spoken to the management of the paper and they liked the idea
of a new columnist, as long as he was good but without too many pretensions. In any case, they could not resolve anything until after the New Year holiday. And so I stayed with the pretext of the job, even though they might tell me no in February.

T
HAT WAS HOW
my first piece was published on the editorial page of
El Heraldo
in Barranquilla on January 5, 1950. I did not want to sign my name so that I would have the cure ready in case things did not work out, which is what had happened at
El Universal.
I did not have to think twice about the pseudonym: Septimus, taken from Septimus Warren Smith, Virginia Woolf’s deluded character in
Mrs. Dalloway.
The title of the column—“La Jirafa”—was the secret nickname I alone knew for my only partner at the dances in Sucre.

It seemed to me that the January winds blew harder than ever that year, and it was almost impossible to walk into them on the streets
they castigated until dawn. The topic of conversation when you woke was the devastation caused by the mad winds during the night, when they carried away dreams and henhouses and turned sheets of zinc from the roofs into flying guillotines.

Today I think those wild winds swept away the remains of a sterile past and opened the doors to a new life for me. My relationship with the group was no longer
based only on pleasure; it became a professional partnership. At first we commented on the subjects we planned to write about or exchanged observations that were not at all doctoral though they were not to be
forgotten. The definitive one for me came one morning when I went into the Japy as Germán Vargas was finishing his silent reading of “La Jirafa,” cut out of that day’s paper. The others in
the group sat around the table waiting for his verdict with a kind of reverential terror that made the smoke in the room even denser. When he finished, without even looking at me, Germán ripped it into pieces, did not say a single word, and mixed the scraps of paper into the trash of cigarette butts and burned matches in the ashtray. No one said anything, the mood at the table did not change, and
the episode was never commented on. But the lesson is still useful to me when out of laziness or haste I am assaulted by the temptation to write a paragraph just to get out of a difficult situation.

At the cheap hotel where I lived for almost a year, the owners began to treat me like a member of the family. My only fortune at the time consisted of my historic sandals, two changes of clothing
that I washed in the shower, and the leather briefcase I had stolen from the most exclusive tearoom in Bogotá during the disturbances of April 9. I carried it everywhere with the originals of whatever I was writing, which was the only thing I had to lose. I would not have risked leaving it under seven locks and keys in the armored vault of a bank. The only person to whom I had entrusted it during
my first nights there was Lácides, the secretive hotel porter, who accepted it as security for the price of my room. He gave intense scrutiny to the strips of typewritten paper entwined in corrections and put the briefcase away in the drawer of the counter. I ransomed it the next day at the time I had promised and continued meeting my payments with so much rigor that he would accept it as a pledge
for as many as three successive nights. This became so serious an understanding that sometimes I would leave it on the counter without saying anything more than good evening, and take the key down from the board myself and go up to my room.

Germán was always aware of my needs, to the point of knowing if I did not have a place to sleep, and he would slip me the peso and a half for a bed. I never
knew how he knew. Thanks to my good behavior I grew close to the hotel personnel,
to the point where the little whores would lend me their own soap for my shower. Presiding over life at the command post, with her sidereal breasts and calabash cranium, was the hotel’s owner and mistress, Catalina la Grande. Her full-time man, the mulatto Jonás San Vicente, had been a deluxe trumpet player until
his gold-filled teeth were knocked out in a mugging meant to steal everything he had. Battered and without the wind to play, he had to change professions and could find nothing better for his six-inch tool than the golden bed of Catalina la Grande. She too had an intimate treasure that in two years helped her to climb from miserable nights on the river docks to the throne of a great madam. I had
the luck to become familiar with the cleverness and free hand of both in making their friends happy. But they never understood why I so often did not have the peso and a half to sleep and yet very elegant people came to pick me up in official limousines.

Another happy event of those days was that I became the only copilot of Mono Guerra, a taxi driver so blond he seemed albino, and so intelligent
and good-natured he had been elected honorary councilman without running for office. His dawns in the red-light district were like movies, because he himself took charge of enriching them—and at times making them crazy—with inspired detours. He would let me know when he had a slow night, and we would spend it together in the lunatic red-light district where our fathers and the fathers of their
fathers had learned how to make us.

I never could discover why, in the middle of so simple a life, I sank without warning into an unexpected apathy. My novel-in-progress—
La casa
—begun some six months earlier, seemed like an uninspired farce to me. I talked about it more than I wrote it, and in reality the small amount of coherent writing I had were fragments that I published earlier and later
in “La Jirafa” and in
Crónica
when I did not have a topic. In the solitude of my weekends, when the others took refuge in their houses, I was lonelier than my left hand in the empty city. My poverty was absolute, and I had the timidity of a quail, which I tried to counteract with insufferable arrogance and brutal frankness. I felt I did not belong anywhere, and even certain acquaintances
made
me aware of this. It was most critical in the newsroom at
El Heraldo,
where I would write for as many as ten hours straight in a remote corner without talking to anyone, enveloped in the dense smoke from the rough cigarettes I smoked without pause in unrelieved solitude. I wrote at top speed, often until daybreak, on strips of newsprint that I carried everywhere in my leather briefcase.

In one
of my many acts of carelessness during those days, I left it in a taxi, and I understood this without bitterness as one more dirty trick played on me by my bad luck. I made no effort to recover it, but Alfonso Fuenmayor, alarmed by my negligence, wrote and published a note at the end of my column: “Last Saturday a briefcase was left in an automobile for hire. In view of the fact that the owner of
the briefcase and the author of this column are, coincidentally, the same person, both of us would be grateful if the person who has it would be kind enough to communicate with either one of us. The briefcase contains absolutely no objects of value: only unpublished ‘jirafas.’ ” Two days later someone left my rough drafts at the porter’s office at
El Heraldo,
without the briefcase and with three
spelling errors corrected in green ink in a very fine hand.

My daily salary was just enough to pay for my room, but what mattered to me least in those days was the abyss of poverty. On the many occasions when I could not pay for the room, I would go to read in the Café Roma as if I were what in reality I was: a solitary man adrift in the night on the Paseo Bolívar. Anyone I knew would receive
a distant greeting from me, if I deigned to look at him, and I would walk along to my habitual place, where I often read until I was startled by the sun. For even then I was still an insatiable reader without any systematic formation. A reader above all of poetry, even bad poetry, because even in the worst of spirits I was convinced that sooner or later bad poetry leads to good.

In my pieces
for “La Jirafa” I showed a great sensitivity to popular culture, in contrast to my stories, which seemed more like Kafkian riddles written by someone who did not know what country he was living in. But the truth of my soul was that the drama of Colombia reached me like a remote echo and
moved me only when it spilled over into rivers of blood. I would light a cigarette without finishing the one
before, I would breathe in the smoke with the longing for life seen in asthmatics gulping down air, and the three packs I consumed each day were evident on my nails and in an old dog’s cough that disrupted my youth. In short, I was shy and sad, like a good Caribbean, and so jealous of my intimate life that I would answer any question about it with a rhetorical digression. I was convinced my bad luck
was congenital and irremediable, above all with women and with money, but I did not care, because I believed I did not need good luck in order to write well. I did not care about glory, or money, or old age, because I was sure I was going to die very young, and in the street.

The trip with my mother to sell the house in Aracataca rescued me from that abyss, and the certainty of the new novel
indicated to me the horizon of a different future. It was decisive among the many I have taken in my life because it showed me in my own flesh that the book I had tried to write was pure rhetorical invention with no foundation at all in poetic truth. The project, of course, shattered when it confronted reality on that revelatory journey.

The model for an epic poem like the one I dreamed about
could not be anything but my own family, which was never a protagonist or even a victim of anything, but only a pointless witness and a victim of everything. I began to write it at the very moment I returned, because an elaboration by artificial means was no longer of any use to me, only the emotional weight I had carried without knowing it and that was waiting for me intact in my grandparents’ house.
With the first step I took onto the burning sands of the town, I had realized that my method was not the happiest for recounting that earthly paradise of desolation and nostalgia, though I devoted a good deal of time and effort to finding the correct one. The problems associated with
Crónica,
which was about to come out, were not an obstacle but just the opposite: they reined in my disquiet.

Except for Alfonso Fuenmayor—who caught me in a creative fever just hours after I began to write it—the rest of my friends believed for a long time that I was still working on the
old project of
La casa.
I decided it should be this way because of a childish fear that people would discover the failure of an idea I had talked about as much as if it had been a masterpiece. But also because of the
superstition I still cultivate of telling one story and writing another so that nobody knows which is which. Above all in press interviews, which in the long run are a dangerous kind of fiction for shy writers who do not want to say more than they should. Germán Vargas, however, must have found out with his mysterious shrewdness, because months after Don Ramón’s trip to Barcelona he told him about
it in a letter: “I believe that Gabito has abandoned the project of
La casa
and is involved in another novel.” Don Ramón, of course, knew that before he left.

From the first line I was certain that the new book ought to be based on the memories of a seven-year-old boy who had survived the public massacre in the banana zone in 1928. But I rejected this very soon because it limited the narrative
to the point of view of a character without sufficient poetic resources to tell it. Then I became aware that my adventure in reading
Ulysses
at the age of twenty, and later
The Sound and the Fury,
were premature audacities without a future, and I decided to reread them with a less biased eye. In effect, much of what had seemed pedantic or hermetic in Joyce and Faulkner was revealed to me then
with a terrifying beauty and simplicity. I planned to diversify the monologue with voices of the entire town, like a narrative Greek chorus, in the style of
As I Lay Dying,
with the reflections of an entire family interposed around a dying man. I did not feel able to repeat his simple device of indicating the names of the characters at each speech, as in theatrical texts, but it gave me the idea
of using no more than the three voices of the grandfather, the mother, and the boy, whose tones and destinies were so different they could be identified on their own. The grandfather in the novel would not be one-eyed like mine, but lame; the mother, absorbed but intelligent, like mine; the boy immobile, frightened, and pensive, as I always had been at his age. It was not in any way a creative
discovery but a simple technical device.

The new book had no change in background during its writing
or any version different from the original, except for excisions and corrections that went on for some two years before its first edition because of my vice of continuing the corrections until death. I had visualized the town in reality—very different from the one in the earlier project—when I
returned to Aracataca with my mother, but this name—as the very wise Don Ramón had warned me—seemed as unconvincing as the name Barranquilla, because it too was lacking in the mythic air I wanted for the novel. And so I decided to call it by the name I no doubt had known as a boy but whose magical charge had not been revealed to me until then: Macondo.