Living to Tell the Tale (61 page)

With a staff like this the newsroom was an eternal entertainment, always subject to the motto of Darío Bautista or Felipe González Toledo: “If you lose your temper you’re fucking yourself.” We all knew everybody else’s subjects and helped as much as we could and to the extent that we were asked. Sharing was so great that you could almost say
we worked out loud. But when things became difficult you could not hear anyone
breathing. From the only desk set on an angle, at the back of the room, José Salgar was in command, and he would walk around the room, informing and becoming informed about everything, while he vented his soul’s passion with his conjurer’s therapy.

I believe that the afternoon when Guillermo Cano took me from desk
to desk, walking the length of the room in order to introduce me into society, was the trial by fire for my invincible timidity. I could not speak and my knees were shaking when, without looking at anyone, Darío Bautista bellowed in his fearsome thundering voice:

“The genius has arrived!”

The only thing I could think of was to make a theatrical half-turn with my arm extended toward everyone
and say the least witty thing that came from my soul:

“Your humble servant.”

I still suffer from the impact of everyone’s jeers, but I also feel the consolation of the embraces and kind words with which each of them welcomed me. From then on I was one more member of that community of charitable tigers whose friendship and esprit de corps never weakened. Any information I needed for an article,
no matter how small, I would request from the corresponding reporter, who never failed to get it to me on time.

I received my first great lesson as a reporter from Guillermo Cano, and the entire newsroom experienced it one afternoon when a downpour fell on Bogotá that kept it in a state of universal flood for three hours on end. The torrent of churning water on the Avenida Jiménez de Quesada
swept everything in its path down the slope of the hills and left a wake of catastrophe on the streets. Cars of every description and public transport were paralyzed in the place where the emergency had caught them, and thousands of pedestrians struggled to find shelter in the flooded buildings until there was no room left for more. We reporters, surprised by the disaster at the moment the paper was
going to press, contemplated the sad spectacle from the windows, not knowing what to do, standing like punished children with our hands in our pockets. All of a sudden
Guillermo Cano seemed to wake from a bottomless sleep, and he turned toward the paralyzed staff and shouted:

“This storm is news!”

It was an unissued order that was obeyed without delay. We ran to our combat posts to obtain by
phone the hasty facts indicated by José Salgar so that all of us could write in bits and pieces the story of the rainstorm of the century. Ambulances and emergency radio patrol cars were immobilized by vehicles stalled in the middle of the streets. Domestic drains were blocked by the water and the entire corps of firefighters was not enough to conjure away the emergency. Whole neighborhoods had to
be evacuated because an urban dam broke. In other districts the sewers erupted. The sidewalks were occupied by ancient invalids, the sick, and asphyxiated children. In the middle of the chaos, five owners of motorboats used for fishing on weekends organized a championship race on the Avenida Caracas, the busiest street in the city. José Salgar distributed these facts, which had been collected on
the spot, to the reporters, and we elaborated on them for the special edition that was improvised on the fly. The photographers, soaked to the skin through their raincoats, processed their photographs at once. A little before five, Guillermo Cano wrote the masterful synthesis of one of the most dramatic storms in the memory of the city. When the weather cleared at last, the improvised edition of
El Espectador
circulated as it did every day, no more than an hour late.

My initial relationship with José Salgar was the most difficult, but it was always more creative than any other. I believe he had the opposite problem to mine: he was always trying to get his staff reporters to make a supreme effort, while I longed for him to put me on that wavelength. But my other commitments to the paper
tied me down, and the only hours I had free were on Sunday. It seems to me that Salgar had his eye on me to be a reporter, while the others had relegated me to films, editorials, and cultural matters because I always had been designated a short-story writer. But my dream was to be a reporter ever since my first steps on the coast, and I knew that Salgar was the best teacher, but he closed doors
to me, perhaps in the
hope that I would knock them down and force my way in. We worked very well in a cordial and dynamic way, and each time I handed him material written according to Guillermo Cano and even Eduardo Zalamea, he approved it without hesitation but did not forgo the ritual. He made the strenuous gesture of forcing a cork out of a bottle and said with more seriousness than he himself
seemed to believe:

“Wring the neck of the swan.”
^*

But he was never aggressive. Just the opposite: a cordial man, forged in fire, who had climbed the ladder of good service, from distributing coffee in the printing plant when he was fourteen to becoming the editor in chief with the greatest professional authority in Colombia. I believe he could not forgive me for wasting my time on lyrical sleight-of-hand
in a country where so many hard-hitting reporters were needed. On the other hand, I thought that no journalism was better than feature articles for expressing daily life. But today I know that the obstinacy with which we both tried to do this was the greatest incentive I had for realizing the distant dream of becoming a reporter.

The opportunity waylaid me at twenty past eleven on the morning
of June 9, 1954, as I was coming back from visiting a friend in the Modelo Prison in Bogotá. Army troops armed for war kept a crowd of students at bay on Carrera Séptima, two blocks from the corner where Jorge Eliécer Gaitán had been assassinated six years earlier. It was a demonstration protesting the killing of a student the day before by members of the Colombia Battalion who had been trained for
the Korean War, and the first street clash between civilians and the government of the Armed Forces. From where I stood you could hear only the shouts of the argument between the students who were trying to proceed to the Palacio Presidencial and the soldiers who were stopping them. In the middle of the crowd we could not understand what they were shouting, but you could sense the
tension in the
air. Then, with no warning at all, we heard a burst of machine-gun fire followed by two more, one right after the other. Several students and some passersby were killed on the spot. The survivors who tried to take the wounded to the hospital were dissuaded with blows from rifle butts. The troops evacuated the area and closed off the streets. In the stampeding crowd I lived again in a few seconds
all the horror of April 9, at the same hour and in the same place.

I almost raced the three steep blocks to the building of
El Espectador
and found the newsroom cleared for action. With a knot in my throat I recounted what I had been able to see at the site of the massacre, but someone who knew even less was already writing at top speed the first article about the identity of the nine dead students
and the condition of the wounded in the hospitals. I was sure they would order me to recount the outrage because I was the only one who had seen it, but Guillermo Cano and José Salgar had already agreed that it ought to be a collective report in which each person would contribute something. The reporter in charge, Felipe González Toledo, would give it its final unity.

“Take it easy,” said Felipe,
concerned about my disappointment. “People know that everybody here works on everything even if it’s unsigned.”

For his part, Ulises consoled me with the idea that the editorial I had to write could be the most important element because it would deal with a very serious problem of public order. He was right, but it was so delicate a piece, and so compromising to the paper’s politics, that it
was written by several hands at the highest levels. I believe it was an important lesson for everyone, but to me it seemed disheartening. That was the end of the honeymoon between the government of the Armed Forces and the Liberal press. It had begun a year earlier with General Rojas Pinilla’s assumption of power, which allowed the country a sigh of relief after the bloodbath of two successive Conservative
governments, and it lasted until that day. For me it was also a trial by fire in my dream of being an ordinary reporter.

A short while later a photograph was published of the body of an unclaimed child whom they had not been able to identify
in the amphitheater of Forensic Medicine, and to me it looked the same as one published a few days earlier of another child who had disappeared. I showed
them to the head of the judicial section, Felipe González Toledo, and he called the mother of the first boy, who still had not been found. It was a lesson for the rest of my life. The mother of the child who had disappeared was waiting for Felipe and me in the vestibule of the amphitheater. She seemed so poor and diminished that I made a supreme effort, wishing with all my heart that the corpse was
not her son. In the long glacial basement, under intense lighting, there were some twenty tables arranged in a row with bodies like stone burial mounds under dull sheets. The three of us followed the solemn guard to the next-to-the-last table in the rear. Under the bottom edge of the sheet the soles of some sad little boots could be seen, the heels very worn down by use. The woman recognized them,
turned livid, but controlled herself with her last breath until the guard removed the sheet with a bullfighter’s flourish. It was the body of a boy about nine years old, his eyes open and astonished, and wearing the same wretched clothes in which he had been found, dead for several days, in a ditch beside the road. The mother let out a howl and fell to the floor, screaming. Felipe picked her up
and calmed her with murmurs of consolation, while I asked myself if that ought to be the profession I dreamed about. Eduardo Zalamea confirmed for me that it was not. He also thought that crime reporting, so well established among readers, was a difficult specialization that required a certain kind of character and an impregnable heart. I never attempted it again.

A very different kind of reality
forced me to be a movie critic. It had never occurred to me that I could be one, but in Don Antonio Daconte’s Olympia Theater in Aracataca, and then in the traveling school of Álvaro Cepeda, I had glimpsed the basic elements for writing a guide to films using a more helpful criterion than the one known until then in Colombia. Ernesto Volkening, a great German writer and literary critic who had
lived in Bogotá since the war, broadcast a commentary on new films on Radio Nacional, but it was limited to an audience of specialists. There were other excellent but occasional
commentators associated with the Catalan bookseller Luis Vicens, a resident of Bogotá since the Spanish Civil War. It was he who founded the first cinema club with the painter Enrique Grau, the critic Hernando Salcedo,
and the hard work of the journalist Gloria Valencia de Castaño Castillo, who had first-class credentials. There was an immense public in the country for big action movies and tearful melodramas, but good cinema was limited to well-educated aficionados, and exhibitors were willing to risk less and less on films that ran for three days on posters. Finding a new public in that faceless crowd required
a difficult but possible pedagogy that would foster an audience open to good films and help exhibitors who wanted to show them but could not finance them. The greatest difficulty was that exhibitors could hold over the press the threat of canceling movie advertisements—which provided substantial income to the papers—in reprisal for negative reviews.
El Espectador
was the first to face the risk,
and I was assigned the task of commenting on the movie openings of the week, more as an elementary primer for fans than as pontificating criticism. One precaution taken by common consent was that I would always carry my complimentary pass intact as proof that I had bought my ticket at the box office.

The first reviews soothed the exhibitors because they were about films in a good sampling of
foreign cinema. Among them,
Puccini,
an extensive recapitulation of the life of the great musician;
So This Is Love,
which was the well-told story of the singer Grace Moore; and
La Fête à Henriette,
a peaceable comedy by Julien Duvivier. The owners we met as we left the theater indicated their satisfaction with our critical comments. Álvaro Cepeda, on the other hand, woke me at six in the morning
with a call from Barranquilla when he learned of my audacity.

“How could you even think of being a movie critic without my permission, damn it!” he shouted into the telephone, convulsed with laughter. “You’re an imbecile about films!”

He became my constant assistant, of course, though he never agreed with the idea that it was not a question of teaching but of orienting an elementary public without
academic training. And the honeymoon with the owners was not as sweet as we
thought at the beginning. When we faced commercial cinema pure and simple, even the most understanding complained of the harshness of our comments. Eduardo Zalamea and Guillermo Cano were able to deflect them on the phone until the end of April, when an exhibitor who presumed to be a leader accused us in an open letter
of intimidating the public in order to prejudice his interests. It seemed to me that the heart of the problem was that the author of the letter did not know the meaning of the word intimidate, but I felt on the verge of defeat because I did not believe it possible that in the paper’s crisis of expansion, Don Gabriel Cano would renounce movie advertisements for the sake of pure esthetic pleasure.
On the day he received the letter, he summoned his sons and Ulises to an urgent meeting, and I considered it a given that the section would be dead and buried. But as he passed my desk after the meeting, Don Gabriel said to me without specifying the subject and with a grandfather’s mischievousness: