Living to Tell the Tale (59 page)

For me that shed in the courtyard was a stroke of luck, because the many hours I had to spare I spent reading in a hammock in the suffocating heat of midday. In times of famine I even read treatises on surgery and accounting manuals, not
thinking they would be of use to me in
my adventures as a writer. The work was almost spontaneous, because most of my clients were connected somehow to the Iguarán and Cotes clans, and one visit that would last until lunch, evoking family secrets, was enough. Some signed the contract without reading it so as to be on time since the rest of the tribe was waiting for us to have lunch in the shade of the accordions. Between Valledupar and
La Paz I reaped my great harvest in less than a week and returned to Barranquilla with the feeling that I had been in the only place in the world I really understood.

Very early on June 13, I was going somewhere on the bus when I learned that the Armed Forces had taken power in light of the disorder that reigned in the government and throughout the country. The year before, on September 6, a
mob of Conservative thugs and uniformed police in Bogotá had set fire to the buildings of
El Tiempo
and
El Espectador,
the two most important daily papers in the country, and used guns in their attacks on the residences of former president Alfonso López Pumarejo, and Carlos Lleras Restrepo, president of the Liberal leadership. The latter, known as a politician with a hard character, managed to
exchange shots with his attackers, but in the end he found himself obliged to escape over the walls of a nearby house. The situation of official violence that the country had endured since April 9 had become untenable.

Until dawn of that June 13, when the division general Gustavo Rojas Pinilla removed the acting president, Roberto Urdaneta Arbeláez. Laureano Gómez, the titular president who had
resigned on the advice of his doctors, then reassumed power in a wheelchair and tried to effect a coup against himself and govern for the fifteen months remaining in his constitutional term. But Rojas Pinilla and his staff had come to stay.

National backing was immediate and unanimous for the decision of the Constituent Assembly that legitimized the military coup. Rojas Pinilla was invested with
powers until the end of the presidential term, in August of the following year, and Laureano Gómez traveled with his family to Benidorm, on the east coast of Spain, leaving behind the illusory impression that his times of raging fury had come to an end. The Liberal patriarchs
proclaimed their support of national reconciliation with a call to their fellow party members fighting throughout the country.
The most significant photograph that the newspapers printed in the days that followed was of an advance party of Liberals singing a lovers’ serenade under the balcony of the presidential bedroom. The homage was led by Don Roberto García Peña, publisher of
El Tiempo
and one of the fiercest opponents of the deposed regime.

In any case, the most moving photograph from those days showed the interminable
line of Liberal guerrillas turning in their weapons on the eastern Llanos, commanded by Guadalupe Salcedo, whose image as a romantic bandit had touched in a profound way the hearts of Colombians punished by official violence. It was a new generation of guerrilla fighters against the Conservative regime, who were identified somehow as left over from the War of a Thousand Days and who maintained
relations that were in no way clandestine with the legal heads of the Liberal Party.

At their head, Guadalupe Salcedo had disseminated a new mythic image to all levels in the country, those in favor of him and those opposed. Perhaps that was why—four years after his surrender—he was riddled with bullets by the police somewhere in Bogotá, in a place that has never been specified, under circumstances
that have not been established with certainty.

The official date is June 6, 1957, and in a solemn ceremony his body was placed in a numbered crypt of the central cemetery in Bogotá, with well-known politicians in attendance. For Guadalupe Salcedo, from his fighting headquarters, maintained not only political but social relations with the leaders of a Liberalism in disgrace. But there are at least
eight different versions of his death, and no lack of skeptics from that time and this who still wonder if the body was his and if in fact it is in the crypt where it was buried.

In that state of mind I set out on my second business trip to the Province, after confirming with Villegas that everything was in order. As I had the first time, I made very rapid sales in Valledupar to a clientele convinced
ahead of time. I went with Rafael Escalona and Poncho Cotes to Villanueva, La Paz,
Patillal, and Manaure de la Sierra to visit veterinarians and agronomists. Some had spoken with buyers from my previous trip and were waiting for me with special orders. Any time of day was fine for organizing a fiesta with these same clients and their good-natured
compadres,
and we would stay up all night singing
with the great accordion players, not interfering with commitments or the payment of urgent bills because ordinary life continued its natural rhythm in the uproar of our carousing. In Villanueva we were with an accordion player and two drummers who appeared to be the grandchildren of someone we had listened to as children in Aracataca. So that what had been a childhood enthusiasm was revealed to
me on that trip as an inspired craft that would accompany me for the rest of my life.

This time I got to know Manaure, in the heart of the sierra, a beautiful and tranquil town, historic in my family because that was where they took my mother for a change of climate when she was a girl and had a tertian fever that resisted all kinds of potions. I had heard so much about Manaure, about its May
afternoons and medicinal breakfasts, that when I was there for the first time I realized I remembered it as if I had known it in a former life.

We were having a cold beer in the only tavern in town when a man approached our table who looked like a tree, wore riding gaiters, and had a military revolver in his belt. Rafael Escalona introduced us, and he stood looking into my eyes, still holding
my hand.

“Do you have anything to do with Colonel Nicolás Márquez?” he asked.

“I’m his grandson,” I told him.

“Then,” he said, “your grandfather killed my grandfather.”

That is to say, he was the grandson of Medardo Pacheco, the man my grandfather had killed in a duel. He did not give me time to be frightened because he said it in a very warm manner, as if this too was a way of being kin.
We caroused with him for three days and three nights in his double-bottomed truck, drinking warm brandy and eating stewed goat in memory of our dead grandfathers. Several days went by before he confessed
the truth: he had arranged with Escalona to frighten me, but he did not have the heart to go on with the jokes about our dead grandfathers. In reality his name was José Prudencio Aguilar, and
he was a smuggler by trade, an upright and goodhearted man. In homage to him, and to even the score, in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
I gave his name to the rival killed with a lance by José Arcadio Buendía in the cockfighting pit.

The bad thing was that at the end of that nostalgic trip the books I had sold had not yet arrived, and without them I could not collect my advance. I was left without
a
céntimo
and the hotel metronome was moving faster than my nights of fiesta. Víctor Cohen began to lose the little patience remaining to him because of the lie that I was squandering the money for his bill with low-class drunks and cheap sluts. The only thing that gave me back my peace of mind was the thwarted love affair in
The Right to Be Born,
the radio soap opera by Don Félix B. Caignet,
whose popular impact revived my old illusions about sentimental literature. The unexpected reading of Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea,
which came as a surprise in the magazine
Life en Español,
completed my recovery from my sorrows.

In the same mail delivery the shipment of books arrived, which I had to distribute to their owners in order to collect my advance. Everyone paid on time, but by
now I owed the hotel more than twice what I had earned, and Villegas warned me that I would not get anything else for another three weeks. Then I had a serious conversation with Víctor Cohen, and he accepted an IOU with a guarantor. Since Escalona and his crew were not available, a providential friend did that favor for me with no obligations, just because he had liked a story of mine published
in
Crónica.
But at the moment of truth I could not pay anyone.

The IOU became historic years later when Víctor Cohen would show it to his friends and visitors, not as an accusatory document but as a trophy. The last time I saw him he was almost one hundred years old, tall, slim, and lucid, and with his sense of humor intact. Almost fifty years later, at the baptism of the son of my
comadre
Consuelo
Araujonoguera, for whom I
was godfather, I saw the unpaid IOU. Víctor Cohen showed it to anyone who wanted to see it, with his usual grace and courtesy. I was surprised by the neatness of the document he had written and the enormous will to pay that could be seen in the boldness of my signature. Víctor celebrated it that night by dancing a
vallenato
promenade with the kind of colonial elegance
no one had brought to that dance since the days of Francisco el Hombre. When it was over, many friends thanked me for not having paid the IOU that had given rise to that priceless night.

The seductive magic of Dr. Villegas would produce even more, but not with books. It is not possible to forget the majestic skill with which he sidestepped creditors and the joy with which they understood his
reasons for not paying on time. The most tempting of his subjects at the time had to do with the novel
The Roads Have Been Closed,
by the Barranquillan writer Olga Salcedo de Medina, which had provoked an uproar more social than literary, with few regional precedents. Inspired by the success of
The Right to Be Born,
which I had followed with growing interest for the entire month, I thought we
were in the presence of a popular phenomenon we writers could not ignore. Without even referring to my debt, I had mentioned this to Villegas on my return from Valledupar, and he proposed that I write the adaptation with enough wickedness to triple the vast audience already caught up in the radio drama of Félix B. Caignet.

I made the adaptation for radio broadcast in two weeks of seclusion that
seemed much more revelatory than I had anticipated, with measured dialogues, degrees of intensity, and situations and quick tempos that in no way resembled anything I had written before. With my inexperience in dialogue—which still is not my forte—the effort was valuable and I was more grateful for what I learned than for what I earned. But I had no complaints about that either, because Villegas
advanced me half the amount in cash and agreed to cancel my earlier debt with the first income from the soap opera.

It was recorded at the Atlántico station, with the best possible regional distribution, and directed without experience or
inspiration by Villegas himself. For the narrator, Germán Vargas had been recommended as a speaker who would be distinctive because of the contrast between
his sobriety and the stridency of local radio. The first great surprise was that Germán agreed, and the second was that after the first rehearsal he concluded he was not the right person. Then Villegas in person assumed responsibility for the narration with his Andean cadence and hisses, which in the end denatured that bold adventure.

The entire soap opera was recorded with more grief than glory,
and it was a brilliant classroom for my insatiable ambitions as a narrator in any genre. I attended the recordings, which were made directly onto the blank disc with a needle like a plow that left tufts of black, luminous, almost invisible filaments, like angel hair. Each night I took home a large handful that I distributed to my friends as an unusual trophy. With untold difficulties and shoddy
work, the soap opera was aired at the same time as a colossal party very typical of the promoter.

No one could invent even a pro forma argument to make me believe that anyone liked it, but it had a good audience and enough of a publicity campaign to save face. It was my good fortune that it infused me with new energy in a genre that seemed to be racing toward unimaginable horizons. My gratitude
to and admiration for Don Félix B. Caignet reached the point where I asked him for a private interview some ten years later, when I lived for a few months in Havana as a reporter at the Cuban agency Prensa Latina. But despite all kinds of arguments and pretexts, he never would see me, and all I had from him was a brilliant lesson that I read in one of his interviews: “People always want to cry:
the only thing I do is give them an excuse.” And Villegas’s magic spells produced nothing else. There were complications with Editorial González Porto—as there had been earlier with Losada—and there was no way to settle our final accounts because he abandoned his dreams of greatness and returned to his country.

Álvaro Cepeda Samudio took me out of purgatory with his old idea of transforming
El Nacional
into the modern newspaper he had learned how to make in the United States. Until
then, aside from his occasional contributions to
Crónica,
which always were literary, he had only had the opportunity to use his degree from Columbia University in the condensed pieces he would send to
The Sporting News,
in St. Louis, Missouri. At last, in 1953, our friend Julián Davis Echandía, who had
been Álvaro’s first employer, called to ask him to take charge of the general management of his evening paper,
El Nacional.
Álvaro himself had disturbed him with the astronomical project he presented to him on his return from New York, but once the mastodon had been captured he called to ask me to help him carry it, with no titles or specified duties, but with an advance on my first paycheck that
was enough for me to live on even without collecting my entire salary.