Living to Tell the Tale (27 page)

I do not know what in fact I learned during my captivity in the Liceo Nacional, but the four years of harmonious coexistence with everyone
instilled a unitary vision of the nation in me, I discovered how diverse we were and what we were good for, and I learned and never forgot that the entire country was in fact the sum total of each one of us. Perhaps this was what they meant at the ministry regarding the regional mobility that the government was fostering. When I was already mature and had been invited into the cockpit of a
transatlantic plane, the first words the captain said to me were to ask where I was from. I only had to hear him to answer:

“I’m as much from the coast as you are from Sogamoso.”

He had the same way of being, the same expression, the
same quality of voice as Marco Fidel Bulla, who sat next to me in the fourth year at the
liceo.
This flash of intuition taught me to navigate the swamps of that
unpredictable community, even without a compass and against the current, and may well have been a master key in my occupation as a writer.

I felt as if I were living a dream, for I had not aspired to a scholarship because I wanted to study but in order to maintain my independence from any other involvement and remain on good terms with my family. The certainty of three meals a day was enough
to suppose that in this refuge for the poor we lived better than in our own houses, under a regime of supervised autonomy less obvious than domestic power. A market system functioned in the dining room that allowed each student to arrange his portions as he chose. Money had no value. The two eggs at breakfast were the most sought-after coin, because with them you could buy at a profit any other dish
from the three meals. Each thing had its exact equivalent, and nothing disturbed that legitimate commerce. Even more: I do not remember a single fistfight for any reason during the four years I boarded there.

The teachers, who ate at another table in the same room, were not adverse to personal exchanges, for they still carried with them the habits of their own recent schools. The majority were
bachelors, or lived there without their wives, and their salaries were almost as meager as the allowances from our families. They complained about the food with as much volubility as we did, and in a dangerous crisis the possibility arose of our conspiring with some of them on a hunger strike. Only when they received gifts or had guests from outside did they permit themselves inspired dishes that
broke down our equality on that one occasion. That was the case, in the fourth year, when the school doctor promised us an ox heart to study in his anatomy course. The next day he sent it, still fresh and bloody, to the refrigerators in the kitchen, but it was not there when we went to get it for class. It was learned that at the last minute, for lack of an ox heart, the doctor had sent the heart
of a bricklayer who had been killed when he slipped and fell from a fourth floor. Since there was not enough for everyone, the cooks prepared
it with exquisite sauces, believing it was the ox heart they had been told would be served at the teachers’ table. I believe these fluid relationships between teachers and students were the result in part of the recent reform in education, of which little
remained in history, but that did serve at least to simplify protocols for us. Age differences were reduced, the rules about wearing a tie were relaxed, and no one was ever alarmed again because teachers and students had a few drinks together and attended the same Saturday dances with girls.

This atmosphere was possible only because of the kind of instructors who, in general, permitted easy personal
relationships. Our mathematics teacher, with his learning and harsh sense of humor, turned classes into a terrifying fiesta. His name was Joaquín Giraldo Santa, and he was the first Colombian to obtain a doctorate in mathematics. To my misfortune, and despite my great efforts and his, I never succeeded in integrating into his class. People used to say in those days that poetic vocations interfered
with mathematics, and in the end I not only believed it but was shipwrecked in the discipline. Geometry was more merciful, perhaps on account of its literary prestige. Arithmetic, on the other hand, behaved with hostile simplicity. Even today, in order to do a mental calculation, I have to break numbers into their easiest components, in particular seven and nine, whose tables I never could
memorize. So in order to add seven and four, I take two from seven, add four to the five I have left, and then I add on the two: eleven! Multiplication always failed me because I never could remember the numbers I had in mind. I dedicated my best efforts to algebra, not only out of respect for its classical heritage but because of my affection for and terror of the teacher. It was useless. I failed
each trimester, made it up twice, and failed in another illicit attempt that they conceded to me out of charity.

Three of the most self-sacrificing instructors taught languages. The first was the English teacher, Mister Abella, a pure Caribbean with perfect Oxonian diction and a somewhat ecclesiastical fervor for
Webster’s Dictionary,
which he would recite with his eyes closed. His successor
was Héctor Figueroa, a good young teacher with a feverish passion for the boleros that
we would sing in harmony during recess. I did the best I could in the stupor of classes and on the final examination, but I believe my good grade was not because of Shakespeare so much as Leo Marini and Hugo Romani, the Argentine singers of boleros responsible for so many paradises and so many suicides of love.
The fourth-year French teacher, Monsieur Antonio Yelá Alban, found me intoxicated by detective novels. His classes bored me as much as all the rest, but his opportune references to street French helped me to not die of hunger in Paris ten years later.

The majority of the teachers had been trained at the Normal Superior under the direction of Dr. José Francisco Socarrás, a psychiatrist from San
Juan del César bent on replacing the clerical pedagogy of a century of Conservative governments with a humanistic rationalism. Manuel Cuello del Río was a radical Marxist who, perhaps for that reason, admired Lin Yutang and believed in apparitions of the dead. The library of Carlos Julio Calderón, presided over by his countryman José Eustasio Rivera, author of
The Vortex,
was divided into equal
parts of Greek classics, Latin American members of Stone and Sky, and romantics from everywhere. Thanks to all of them, the few of us who were assiduous readers read St. John of the Cross or José María Vargas Vila, as well as the apostles of the proletarian revolution. Gonzalo Ocampo, the social sciences instructor, had a good political library in his room that circulated without malice in the classrooms
of the older students, but I never understood why
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
by Friedrich Engels was studied in the arid afternoons of political economy and not in literature classes as the epic poem of a beautiful human adventure. During recreation periods Guillermo López Guerra read
Anti-Dühring,
also by Engels, lent to him by Professor Gonzalo Ocampo. But when
I asked him for it so I could discuss it with López Guerra, Ocampo said he would not do me that bad turn with a great tome fundamental to the progress of humanity but so long and boring it might not pass into history. Perhaps this ideological swapping contributed to the
liceo
’s bad reputation as a laboratory of political perversion. But I needed half a lifetime to realize it might have
been more
of a spontaneous experiment to frighten away the weak and immunize the strong against all kinds of dogmatisms.

My most direct relationship was always with Professor Carlos Julio Calderón, the teacher of Spanish in the lower grades, of world literature in the fourth year, Spanish literature in the fifth, and Colombian literature in the sixth. And of something odd in his formation, considering
his tastes: accounting. He had been born in Neiva, the capital of the department of Huila, and he never tired of proclaiming his patriotic admiration for José Eustasio Rivera. He had been obliged to interrupt his studies of medicine and surgery, and he remembered this as the frustration of his life, but his passion for arts and letters was irresistible. He was the first teacher to demolish my rough
drafts with pertinent observations.

In any case, relations between students and teachers were exceptional for their naturalness, not only in classes but, in a special way, in the recess yard after supper, which permitted a kind of behavior different from what we were accustomed to and no doubt favored the climate of respect and camaraderie in which we lived.

I owe a terrifying adventure to the
complete works of Freud, which were in the library. I did not understand anything of his scabrous analyses, of course, but his clinical cases, like the fantasies of Jules Verne, kept me in suspense to the end. Professor Calderón asked us to write a story on any subject in Spanish class. One occurred to me about a mental patient, a girl of seven, with a pedantic title that was just the opposite
of poetry: “A Case of Obsessive Psychosis.” The teacher had it read in class. The boy next to me, Aurelio Prieto, rejected without reservations the presumptuousness of writing about so twisted a subject without the slightest scientific or literary training. I explained, with more rancor than humility, that I had taken it from a clinical case described by Freud in his memoirs, and my only intention
had been to use it for the assignment. Maestro Calderón, perhaps believing I was resentful because of acid criticism from several of my classmates, called me aside during recess to encourage me to continue along the same path. He pointed out that in my story it was evident I knew nothing
about the techniques of modern fiction, but I had the instinct and the desire. He thought it was well written,
and at least it intended something original. For the first time he spoke to me of rhetoric. He gave me some practical thematic and metrical devices for versifying without pretensions, and he concluded that in any event I ought to continue writing even if only for my mental health. That was the first of the long conversations we held at recreational periods and other free times during my years
at the
liceo,
to which I owe a great deal in my life as a writer.

It was an ideal climate for me. Beginning at the Colegio San José, the vice of reading everything I came across was so deep-seated that I spent my free time and almost all my time in classes doing just that. When I was sixteen, with good spelling or without it, I could repeat without pausing for breath the poems I had learned at
the Colegio San José. I read and reread them with no help or order, and almost always in secret during classes. I believe I had read the entire indescribable library of the
liceo,
made up of the castoffs of other less useful ones: official collections, legacies of indifferent teachers, unsuspected books washed ashore from who knows what remnants of shipwrecks. I cannot forget the Aldeana Library
of the Editorial Minerva, sponsored by Don Daniel Samper Ortega and distributed in elementary and secondary schools by the Ministry of Education. It consisted of one hundred volumes that contained all the good and all the worst written in Colombia until that time, and I proposed reading them in numerical order for as long as my heart could stand it. What still terrifies me today is that I almost
achieved my goal in my last two years at the
colegio,
and for the rest of my life I have not been able to establish if it was of any use to me.

Dawns in the dormitory had a suspicious resemblance to happiness, except for the lethal bell that sounded the alarm—as we used to say—at six in the middle of the night. Only two or three mental defectives would jump out of bed to be first in line for
the six showers of icy water in the dormitory bathroom. The rest of us used the time to squeeze out the last drops of sleep until the teacher on duty walked the length of the room
pulling the blankets off the sleepers. It was an hour and a half of open intimacy for putting our clothes in order, polishing our shoes, taking a shower in the liquid ice from the pipe without a showerhead, while each
of us shouted out his frustrations and made fun of those of the rest, violated romantic secrets, aired deals and disagreements, and agreed on the bartering in the dining room. The morning subject of constant discussions was the chapter read the night before.

Starting at dawn, Guillermo Granados gave free rein to his virtues as a tenor with an inexhaustible repertoire of tangos. With Ricardo González
Ripoll, my neighbor in the dormitory, we would sing duets of Caribbean
guarachas
to the rhythm of the rag we used to polish our shoes at the head of the bed, while my
compadre
Sabas Caravallo walked from one end of the dormitory to the other as naked as the day he was born, a towel hanging from his penis of reinforced concrete.

If it had been possible, a good number of us would have escaped in
the middle of the night to keep dates planned on weekends. There were no night guards or dormitory monitors except for the teacher on duty for the week. And the eternal porter, Riveritos, who in reality always slept while he was awake and carrying out his daily duties. He lived in a room in the attic and did his work well, but at night we could unbar the heavy church doors, move them without any
noise, enjoy the night in another house, and return a short while before dawn along the glacial streets. No one ever knew if Riveritos really slept like the dead man he seemed to be, or if it was his gallant way of being an accomplice to his boys. Not many escaped, and their secrets decayed in the memory of their faithful accomplices. I knew some who did this as a matter of routine, others who dared
go once with a courage that filled them with the tension of the adventure, and returned exhausted by terror. We never knew of anyone who was caught.

My only social difficulty at school were the sinister nightmares inherited from my mother, which burst into other people’s sleep like howls from beyond the grave. Students in the beds near me knew all about my nightmares and feared them only for
the terror of the first howl in the silence of the night.
The teacher on duty, who slept in a chamber made of cardboard, sleepwalked from one end of the dormitory to the other until calm was restored. The dreams not only were uncontrollable but had something to do with my bad conscience, because on two occasions they happened to me in bawdy houses. They were also indecipherable, because they did
not occur in terrifying visions but in joyful episodes with ordinary persons or places that all at once revealed sinister information in an innocent glance. A nightmare that could not compare to one of my mother’s, who held her own head in her lap and rid it of the nits and lice that did not allow her to sleep. My shouts were not cries of fear but calls for help so that someone would be kind enough
to wake me. In the dormitory of the
liceo
there was no time for anything, because at the first moan the pillows thrown from nearby beds fell all over me. I would awake panting and with my heart in an uproar, but happy to be alive.