Living to Tell the Tale (57 page)

I was left in a difficult position. The move to Cartagena had been opportune and useful after my experience on
Crónica,
and it also provided a very favorable environment for continuing to write
Leaf Storm,
above all because of the creative fever with which we lived in our house, where the most unusual things always seemed possible. It would be enough
for me to recall a lunch when we were talking to my papá about the difficulty many writers had in writing their memoirs when they no longer could remember anything. Cuqui, just six years old, drew the conclusion with masterful simplicity:

“Then,” he said, “the first thing a writer ought to write is his memoirs, when he can still remember everything.”

I did not dare confess that the same thing
that had happened to me with
La casa
was happening with
Leaf Storm:
I was becoming more interested in the technique than in the subject. After a year of working with so much euphoria, the novel revealed itself to me as a circular labyrinth without an entrance or an exit. Today I believe I know why. The
costumbrismo
^*
that offered such good examples of renovation in its origins had, in the end,
fossilized the great national themes that were trying to open emergency exits. The fact is I could not bear another minute of uncertainty. I only needed to verify some information and make some stylistic decisions before putting in the final period, and still I could not feel it breathing. But I was so
bogged down after so much time working in the dark that I saw the book foundering and did not
know where the cracks were. The worst thing was that at this point in the writing no one could help me, because the fissures were not in the text but inside me, and only I had the eyes to see them and the heart to endure them. Perhaps for this same reason I suspended “La Jirafa” without thinking too much about it when I finished paying
El Heraldo
the advance I had used to buy the furniture.

Sad to say, neither ingenuity, resistance, nor love were enough to defeat poverty. Everything seemed to favor it. The census had ended after a year, and my salary at
El Universal
was not enough to compensate. I did not return to the faculty of law in spite of the stratagems of certain teachers who had conspired to move me ahead despite my disinterest in their interest and erudition. At home everyone’s
money was not enough, but the hole was so large that my contribution was never enough and the lack of hope affected me more than the lack of money.

“If we’re all going to drown,” I said at lunch on a decisive day, “let me save myself so I can at least try to send you a lifeboat.”

And so the first week in December I moved back to Barranquilla, with everyone resigned, certain the boat would come.
Alfonso Fuenmayor must have imagined it at first glance when he saw me walk unannounced into our old office at
El Heraldo,
for the
Crónica
office had been left without funds. He looked up at me from his typewriter as if I were a ghost and exclaimed in alarm:

“What the hell are you doing here without letting anyone know!”

Few times in my life have I given an answer so close to the truth:

“It’s
all a pain in my balls, Maestro.”

Alfonso calmed down.

“Ah, good!” he replied in his usual way, citing the most Colombian line from the national anthem. “It’s our good fortune: that’s how all of humankind is, moaning in their chains.”

He did not show the slightest curiosity about the reason for my trip. It seemed like a kind of telepathy to him, because he
had told everyone who had asked about
me in recent months that at any moment I would be coming back to stay. He was happy as he got up from his desk and put on his jacket, because I had arrived like a gift from heaven. He was half an hour late for an appointment, he had not finished the next day’s editorial, and he asked me to finish it for him. I just had time to ask him what the subject was, and as he ran down the hallway he answered
in an offhand manner that was typical of the way we were friends:

“Read it and you’ll find out.”

The next day there were two typewriters facing each other again in the office of
El Heraldo,
and I was writing “La Jirafa” again for the same page. And—of course!—at the same price. And with the same close association between Alfonso and me, in which many editorials had paragraphs by one or the other
and it was impossible to distinguish them. Some students of journalism or of literature have tried to differentiate them in the archives and have not been able to, except in the case of specific subjects, not because of the style but because of the cultural information.

At El Tercer Hombre I was saddened by the bad news that they had killed our friend the thief. On a night like every other he
had gone out to ply his trade, and the only thing anyone knew, with no further details, was that he had been shot through the heart in the house that he was robbing. The body was claimed by an older sister, his sole relative, and only we and the owner of the tavern attended his charity funeral.

I returned to the house of the Ávila sisters. Meira Delmar, my neighbor once again, continued purifying
my bad nights at El Gato Negro with her tranquil evenings. She and her sister Alicia seemed like twins because of their natures, and because they made time circular for us when we were with them. In some very special way they were still in the group. At least once a year they invited us to a meal of Arab delicacies that nourished our soul, and in their house there were unexpected evenings with
illustrious visitors, from great artists in any genre to mad poets. I think they and Maestro Pedro Biava were the ones who imposed order on my misguided melomania and enrolled me in the happy crowd at the arts center.

Today it seems to me that Barranquilla gave me a better perspective on
Leaf Storm,
for as soon as I had a desk and typewriter, I began correcting it with renewed energy. At this
time I dared to show the group the first legible copy, knowing it was not finished. We had talked so much about it that there was no need for any kind of warning. Alfonso spent two days writing across from me without even mentioning it. By the third day, when we had finished our assignments late in the afternoon, he put the rough draft on his desk and read the pages he had marked with slips of paper.
More than a critic, he seemed like a tracker of the inconsequential and a purifier of style. His observations were so unerring that I used them all, except one that seemed farfetched to him even after I proved that it was a real episode from my childhood.

“Even reality is mistaken when the literature is bad,” he said, weak with laughter.

Germán Vargas’s method was that if the text was all right
he made no immediate comments but gave a soothing opinion and ended with an exclamation point:

“Damn fine!”

But in the days that followed he kept throwing out strings of scattered ideas about the book, which would culminate on some night of drinking with a well-aimed opinion. If he did not like the rough draft, he met with the author alone and told him so with so much frankness and elegance
that the apprentice could only thank him with all his heart even though he wanted to cry. That was not the case with me. On a day when I did not anticipate it, Germán made a half-joking, half-serious comment about my rough draft that returned my soul to my body.

Álvaro had disappeared from the Japy without any signs of life. Almost a week later, when I least expected it, he blocked my way with
his car on the Paseo Bolívar, and shouted in his best manner:

“Get in, Maestro, I’m going to fuck you over for being an idiot!”

It was his anesthetic sentence. We drove without a destination around the business center, burning in the summer heat, while Álvaro shouted a somewhat emotional but impressive
analysis of his reading. He interrupted it each time he saw someone he knew on the sidewalk
in order to yell a cordial or mocking absurdity at him, and then resumed his impassioned harangue, with his voice cracking with the strain, his hair disheveled, and those bulging eyes that seemed to look at me through the bars of a panopticon. We ended up drinking cold beer on the terrace of Los Almendros, overwhelmed by the shrieking fans of Junior and Sporting across the street, and then overrun
by the avalanche of maniacs who escaped from the stadium deflated by a contemptible score of 2–2. At the last minute Álvaro called his only definitive opinion about the rough draft of my book through the car window:

“In any case, Maestro, you still have a lot of
costumbrismo
!”

Grateful, I managed to shout back:

“But it’s the good Faulkner kind!”

And he put an end to everything not said or
thought with a phenomenal guffaw:

“Don’t be a sonuvabitch!”

Fifty years later, whenever I remember that afternoon, I can hear his explosive outburst of laughter again, resonating like a shower of stones on the burning street.

It was clear to me that the three of them had liked the novel, with their personal and perhaps correct reservations, but they did not say it in so many words, perhaps
because that seemed like an easy tactic to them. No one talked about publishing it, which was also very typical of them, for whom the important thing was writing well. The rest was a matter for publishers.

Which is to say: I was back again in our same old Barranquilla, but my misfortune was my awareness that this time I would not have the heart to go on with “La Jirafa.” In reality it had fulfilled
its mission of imposing on me a daily job of carpentry so I could learn how to write, starting from zero, with tenacity and the fierce aspiration to be a distinctive writer. On many occasions I could not handle the subject, and I would change it for another when I realized it was still too big for me. In any case, it was essential gymnastics for my formation as a writer, with the comfortable
certainty that it was no more than a source of nourishment without any historical commitment.

The simple search for a daily subject had made my first few months bitter. It did not leave me time for anything else: I lost hours scrutinizing other newspapers, I took notes on private conversations, I became lost in fantasies that disturbed my sleep until real life came out to meet me. In that sense,
my happiest experience occurred one afternoon when I saw from a passing bus a simple sign on the door of a house: “Funeral palms for sale.”

My first impulse was to knock at the door in order to ascertain the facts of that discovery, but shyness vanquished me. And so life itself taught me that one of the most useful secrets for writing is to learn to read the hieroglyphs of reality without knocking
or asking anything. In recent years this became much clearer to me when I reread the more than four hundred published “jirafas” and compared them to some of the literary texts they had given rise to.

At Christmas the staff of
El Espectador
arrived on vacation, beginning with the publisher Don Gabriel Cano, with all his children: Luis Gabriel, the manager; Guillermo, who was then deputy editor;
Alfonso, the assistant manager, and Fidel, the youngest, an apprentice in everything. With them was Eduardo Zalamea, Ulises, who had a special value for me because of the publication of my stories and his introductory note. It was their custom to enjoy as a group the first week of the new year at Pradomar, a resort ten leagues from Barranquilla, where they took over the bar by storm. The only thing
I recall with any precision in that tumult is that Ulises in person was one of the great surprises of my life. I had often seen him in Bogotá, at first in El Molino and years later in El Automático, and sometimes at Maestro de Greiff’s
tertulia.
I remembered his unsociable appearance and his metal voice, and on that basis I concluded that he was bad-tempered, which no doubt was the reputation
he had among the good readers at the university. As a consequence I had avoided him on various occasions in order not to contaminate the image I had invented for my own personal use. I was mistaken. He was one of the most affectionate and obliging people I can remember, though I understand he needed a special reason of the mind or heart.
His temperament was nothing like that of Don Ramón Vinyes,
Álvaro Mutis, or León de Greiff, but he shared with them an innate aptitude for teaching at any hour, and the uncommon luck of having read all the books that had to be read.

I became more than a friend of the younger Canos—Luis Gabriel, Guillermo, Alfonso, and Fidel—when I worked as a reporter at
El Espectador.
It would be reckless to try to recall any dialogue from those free-for-all conversations
during the nights in Pradomar, but it would also be impossible to forget their unbearable insistence on the mortal sickness of journalism and literature. They made me another member of the family and their personal storyteller, discovered and adopted by them and for them. But I do not remember—as has been said so often—anybody even suggesting that I go to work with them. I did not regret it,
because at that bad moment I did not have the slightest idea what my destiny would be or if I would be allowed to choose it.

Álvaro Mutis, enthusiastic about the enthusiasm of the Canos, returned to Barranquilla when he was named head of public relations for Colombian Esso and tried to persuade me to work with him in Bogotá. His real mission, however, was much more dramatic: through a terrifying
error by some local concessionaire, the tanks at the airport had been filled with gasoline for cars instead of planes, and it was unthinkable that an aircraft filled with that mistaken fuel could go anywhere. Mutis’s job was to correct the mistake in absolute secrecy before dawn without the airport officials finding out, much less the press. And he did. The fuel was changed to the correct kind
in four hours of conversation and whiskey at the storage tanks of the local airport. We had more than enough time to talk about everything, but the unimaginable subject for me was that Editorial Losada of Buenos Aires would publish the novel I was about to finish. Álvaro Mutis knew this from direct communication with the new manager of Losada in Bogotá, Julio César Villegas, a former minister of
the government of Peru who had taken refuge not long before in Colombia.