Living to Tell the Tale (28 page)

The best thing at the
liceo
were the books read aloud before we went to sleep. The readings had begun through the initiative of Professor Carlos Julio Calderón, with
a story by Mark Twain that the fifth-year students had to study for an emergency exam first thing the next day. He read the four pages aloud in his cardboard cubicle so that the students who had not had time to read it could take notes. Interest was so great that from then on the custom was established of reading aloud every night before going to sleep. It was not easy at first, because some sanctimonious
teacher had imposed the requirement that he choose and expurgate the books that would be read, but the danger of a rebellion left that to the judgment of the older students.

They began with half an hour. The teacher on duty would read in his well-lit room at the entrance to the general dormitory, and at first we would silence him with mocking snores, real or feigned, but almost always deserved.
Later the readings were extended to an hour, depending on the interest of the story, and teachers were relieved by students in weekly shifts. The good times began with Nostradamus and
The Man in the Iron Mask,
which pleased everyone. What I still cannot explain is the thundering success of Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain,
which required the intervention of the rector to keep us from spending
the whole night awake, waiting for Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat to kiss. Or the rare tension of all of us sitting up on our beds in order not to miss a word of the disordered philosophical duels between Naptha and his friend Settembrini. The reading that night lasted for more than an hour and was celebrated in the dormitory with a round of applause.

The only teacher who remained one of the
great unknown quantities of my youth was the rector, whom I had met when I arrived. His name was Alejandro Ramos, a stern, solitary man who had eyeglasses with thick lenses that resembled a blind man’s, and an unostentatious power that carried the weight of an iron fist in every one of his words. He came down from his refuge at seven in the morning to inspect our personal grooming before we went
into the dining room. He wore impeccable clothes in vivid colors, a shirt collar starched as stiff as celluloid with bright ties, and resplendent shoes. He recorded any defect in our personal cleanliness with a grunt that was an order to return to the dormitory to correct it. The rest of the day he spent behind closed doors in his office on the second floor, and we did not see him again until the
following morning at the same time, or as he walked the twelve paces between his office and the sixth-year classroom, where he taught his one mathematics class three times a week. His students said he was a genius with numbers and amusing in his classes, and he left them amazed at his knowledge and trembling with fear of his final examination.

A short while after my arrival, I had to write the
inaugural address for some official ceremony at the
liceo.
Most of the teachers approved the topic but agreed that in such cases the rector had the final word. He lived at the top of the stairs on the second floor, but I suffered the distance as if it were a trip on foot around the world. I had not slept well the night before, I put on my Sunday tie, and I had no appetite for breakfast. My knocking
on the rectory door was so slow that the rector did not open it until my third knock, and he stepped aside for me without a greeting. Just as well, because I would not have had
the voice to reply, not only because of his brusqueness but because of the grandness, order, and beauty of his office with its furniture of noble woods and velvet upholstery, and its walls lined with astonishing bookcases
filled with leatherbound volumes. The rector waited with formal solemnity until I caught my breath. Then he pointed to the visitor’s easy chair in front of the desk, and he sat down in his.

I had prepared the explanation for my visit with almost as much attention as the address. He listened in silence, approved each sentence with a nod of his head, still not looking at me but at the paper trembling
in my hand. At some point that I thought amusing I tried to win a smile from him, but it was useless. Even more: I am sure he already knew the reason for my visit but made me comply with the ritual of explaining it to him.

When I finished he extended his hand over the desk and accepted the paper. He removed his glasses in order to read it with profound attention, and he stopped only to make two
corrections with his pen. Then he put on his glasses and spoke, not looking me in the eye, in a stony voice that made my heart pound.

“There are two problems here,” he said to me. “You wrote: ‘In harmony with the exhuberant flora of our country, which the learned Spaniard José Celestino Mutis revealed to the world in the eighteenth century, in this
liceo
we live in a paradisíacal environment.’
But the fact is that exuberant is spelled without an h and paradisiacal has no accent mark.”

I felt humiliated. I had no answer for the first objection but I had no doubt about the second, and without delay I replied with what remained of my voice:

“Excuse me, Señor Rector, the dictionary allows paradisiacal with or without an accent mark, but the dactyl seemed more sonorous to me.”

He must
have felt as assaulted as I did, because he still did not look at me but took the dictionary from the shelf without saying a word. My heart skipped a beat because it was the same Atlas that had belonged to my grandfather, but new and shining and perhaps unused. At the first try he opened it to the
exact page, read and reread the entry, and asked me without looking up from the page:

“What year
are you in?”

“Third,” I said.

He slammed the dictionary shut with a bang and looked me in the eye for the first time.

“Bravo,” he said. “Keep it up.”

From that day on the only thing missing was for my classmates to proclaim me a hero, and with all the sarcasm possible they began to call me “the kid from the coast who talked to the rector.” However, what affected me most in the interview was
having confronted once again my personal drama with spelling. I never could understand it. One of my teachers tried to give me the coup de grace with the news that Simón Bolívar did not deserve his glory because of his terrible orthography. Others consoled me with the excuse that it is a problem for many people. Even today, when I have published seventeen books, my proofreaders honor me with the
courtesy of correcting my spelling atrocities as if they were simple typographical errors.

Social gatherings in Zipaquirá corresponded in general to the vocation and nature of each person. The salt mines, active when the Spaniards found them, were a tourist attraction on weekends, which were finished off with a brisket baked in the oven and snowy potatoes in large pans of salt. The boarders from
the coast, with our well-deserved reputation for rowdiness and ill-breeding, had the good manners to dance like artists to popular music and the good taste to fall in love forever.

I became so spontaneous that on the day the end of the war was announced, we took to the streets in a show of jubilation with flags, placards, and shouts of victory. Someone asked for a volunteer to make a speech,
and without giving it a second thought I went out to the balcony of the social club facing the main square and improvised one with bombastic shouts that many people thought had been memorized.

It was the only speech I found myself obliged to improvise in the first seventy years of my life. I ended with a lyrical tribute to each of the Big Four, but the one that attracted attention in
the square
was for the president of the United States, who had died a short while before: “Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, like El Cid, knows how to win battles after death.” The sentence remained afloat in the city for several days and was reproduced on street posters and on portraits of Roosevelt in the windows of some stores. And so my first public success was not as a poet or a novelist but as an orator,
and what is even worse, as a political orator. From then on there was no public ceremony at the
liceo
when they did not put me on a balcony, but now I had written speeches that had been corrected down to the last breath.

With time, that brazenness served to give me a case of stage fright that brought me to the point of an absolute inability to speak, whether at large weddings, or in taverns filled
with Indians in ponchos and hemp sandals where we would end up on the floor, or at the house of Berenice, who was beautiful and free of prejudices and who had the good fortune not to marry me because she was mad with love for someone else, or at the telegraph office, whose unforgettable Sarita would send anguished telegrams on credit when my parents were late with their remittances for my personal
expenses, and more than once would advance me money orders to get me out of difficulty. But the least forgettable girl was not anyone’s love but the nymph of the poetry addicts. Her name was Cecilia González Pizano, and she had a quick intelligence, personal charm, and a free spirit in a family whose tradition was conservative, and a supernatural memory for all poetry. She lived across from
the entrance to the
liceo
with an aristocratic, unmarried aunt in a colonial mansion that surrounded a garden of heliotropes. At first it was a relationship confined to poetic competitions, but Cecilia became a true comrade in life, always filled with laughter, who in the end managed to sneak into Professor Calderón’s literature classes with everyone’s complicity.

In my days in Aracataca I had
dreamed about the good life, going from fair to fair and singing with an accordion and a good voice, which always seemed to me to be the oldest and happiest way to tell a story. If my mother had renounced the piano in order to have children, and my father had hung up his
violin in order to support us, it was not at all fair that the oldest of those children would set the good precedent of dying
of hunger on account of music. My eventual participation as a singer and
tiple
player in the group at school proved that I had the ear to learn a more difficult instrument, and that I could sing.

There was no patriotic evening or solemn ceremony at the
liceo
in which I was not involved in some way, always through the grace of Maestro Guillermo Quevedo Zornosa, composer and leading citizen of
the city, eternal conductor of the municipal band who wrote “Amapola”—the poppy on the road, as red as one’s heart—a song of youth that in its time was the soul of soirées and serenades. On Sundays after Mass I was one of the first to cross the park and attend his band concert, always with
La gazza ladra
at the beginning, and the Anvil Chorus, from
Il trovatore,
at the end. The maestro never knew,
and I did not dare tell him, that the dream of my life during those years was to be like him.

When the
liceo
asked for volunteers for a class in music appreciation, Guillermo López Guerra and I were the first to raise our hands. The course would meet on Saturday mornings, led by Professor Andrés Pardo Tovar, director of the first program of classical music on The Voice of Bogotá. We did not occupy
even a fourth of the dining room that had been arranged to accommodate the class, but we were seduced on the spot by his apostle’s fluency. He was the perfect Cachaco, with a dark-blue blazer, a satin vest, a sinuous voice, and deliberate gestures. What would be noteworthy today because of its antiquity was the windup phonograph that he managed with the skill and love of a seal trainer. He began
with the supposition—correct in our case—that we were utter novices. And so he began with Saint-Saëns’s
Carnival of the Animals,
outlining with erudite facts the nature of each animal. Then he played—of course!—Prokofiev’s
Peter and the Wolf.
The bad thing about that Saturday party was that it inculcated in me the embarrassed feeling that the music of the great masters is an almost secret vice,
and it took me many years not to make arrogant distinctions between good and bad.

I had no further contact with the rector until the following year, when he took over the teaching of geometry in the fourth year. He walked into the classroom on the first Tuesday at ten in the morning, said good day with a growl, not looking at anyone, and cleaned the board with the eraser until there was no trace
of dust. Then he turned to us, and still without having called roll, he asked Álvaro Ruiz Torres:

“What is a point?”

There was no time to answer, because the social sciences teacher opened the door without knocking and told the rector he had an urgent call from the Ministry of Education. The rector hurried out to answer the telephone and did not return to class. Never again, because the call
was to inform him that he had been relieved of his position, which he had fulfilled with dedication for five years after a lifetime of devoted service.

His successor was the poet Carlos Martín, the youngest of the good poets from the Stone and Sky group that César del Valle had helped me to discover in Barranquilla. He had published thirty-three books. I knew poems of his and had seen him once
in a bookstore in Bogotá, but I never had anything to say to him, and I did not own any of his books so I could not ask him to sign one. One Monday he appeared unannounced at the lunchtime recess. We had not expected him so soon. He looked more like a lawyer than a poet, with his pinstripe suit, high forehead, and pencil-thin mustache that had a formal rigor also notable in his poetry. Placid and
always somewhat distant, he walked with a measured step toward the closest groups and extended his hand to us:

“Hello, I’m Carlos Martín.”

During that time I was fascinated by the lyrical prose pieces that Eduardo Carranza was publishing in the literary section of
El Tiempo
and in the magazine
Sábado.
I thought it was a genre inspired by Juan Ramón Jiménez’s
Platero and I,
popular with the young
poets who aspired to wipe the myth of Guillermo Valencia off the face of the map. The poet Jorge Rojas, heir to an ephemeral fortune, sponsored with his name and money the publication of some original chapbooks that aroused great
interest in his generation, and unified a group of good, well-known poets.