Living to Tell the Tale (36 page)

This story was published with the same display as the first, on Saturday, October 25, 1947, and
illustrated by a rising star in the Caribbean sky, the painter Enrique Grau. I was struck that my friends accepted this as something routine for a renowned writer. I, on the other hand, suffered over the errors, doubted the successes, but managed to keep my hope alive. The high point came a few days later with a note published by Eduardo Zalamea employing his usual pseudonym, Ulises, in his daily
column in
El Espectador.
It came straight to the point: “Readers of ‘Fin de Semana,’ the literary supplement of this newspaper, will have noted the appearance of a new and original talent with a vigorous personality.” And further on: “In the imagination everything can happen, but knowing how to show with naturalness, simplicity, and without fuss the pearl produced there is not something that all
twenty-year-old boys just beginning their relationship with letters can accomplish.” And he concluded without hesitation: “With García Márquez a new and notable writer has been born.”

The note—how could it not!—brought a shock of happiness, but at the same time it disturbed me that Zalamea had not left himself any way out. Now everything was complete, and I
had to interpret his generosity as
a call to my conscience that would last the rest of my life. The note also revealed that Ulises had discovered my identity through one of his colleagues in the newsroom. That night I learned it had been through Gonzalo González, a close cousin to my closest cousins, who sat five meters from Eduardo Zalamea’s desk and for fifteen years had written for the same paper, with the pseudonym Gog and with
sustained passion, a column that answered questions from readers. To my good fortune Zalamea did not search me out, and I did not search him out. I saw him once at the table of the poet De Greiff and recognized his voice and the harsh cough of an irredeemable smoker, and I was close to him at various cultural events, but no one introduced us. Some because they did not know us and others because they
did not think it possible we did not know each other.

It is difficult to imagine the degree to which people lived then in the shadow of poetry. It was a frenzied passion, another way of being, a fireball that went everywhere on its own. We would open the paper, even the business section or the legal page, or we would read the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup, and there was poetry waiting
to take over our dreams. So that for us aborigines from every province, Bogotá was the capital of the country and the seat of government, but above all it was the city where poets lived. We not only believed in poetry, and would have died for it, but we also knew with certainty—as Luis Cardoza y Aragón wrote—that “poetry is the only concrete proof of the existence of man.”

The world belonged
to the poets. Their new works were more important for my generation than the political news that was more and more depressing. Colombian poetry had emerged from the nineteenth century illuminated by the solitary star of José Asunción Silva, the sublime romantic who at the age of thirty-one shot himself with a pistol through the circle that his doctor had painted for him with a swab of iodine over
his heart. I was not born in time to know Rafael Pombo or Eduardo Castillo—the great lyric poet—whose friends described him as a ghost escaped from his tomb at dusk, with his long cape, a skin turned green by morphine, and the profile of a turkey buzzard:
the physical representation of the
poètes maudits.
One afternoon I was in a streetcar that passed a large mansion on Carrera Séptima, and in
the entrance I saw the most memorable man I had ever seen in my life, wearing an impeccable suit, an English hat, dark glasses for his lightless eyes, and a cattleman’s poncho. He was the poet Alberto Ángel Montoya, a rather ostentatious romantic who published some of the good poems of his time. For my generation they were ghosts from the past, except for Maestro León de Greiff, on whom I spied for
years at the Café El Molino.

None of them succeeded in even touching the glory of Guillermo Valencia, an aristocrat from Popayán who, before he was thirty, established himself as the supreme pontiff of the Generation of the Centenario, so called for having come upon the scene in 1910, the hundredth anniversary of national independence. His contemporaries Eduardo Castillo and Porfirio Barba Jacob,
two great poets in the romantic tradition, did not receive the critical justice they more than deserved in a country dazzled by the marble rhetoric of Valencia, whose mythic shadow barred the way for three generations. The generation just before ours, which emerged in 1925 with the name and drive of The New Ones, had magnificent models like Rafael Maya and, once again, León de Greiff, who were
not recognized in all their greatness as long as Valencia sat on his throne. Until that time he had enjoyed a peculiar glory that carried him to the very doors of the presidency of the Republic.

The only ones who dared oppose him were the poets from the group Stone and Sky with their juvenile chapbooks, who in the final analysis only had in common the virtue of not being Valencistas: Eduardo
Carranza, Arturo Camacho Ramírez, Aurelio Arturo, and Jorge Rojas, who had financed the publication of their poems. They were not all the same in form or inspiration, but as a group they made the archaeological ruins of the Parnassians tremble and brought to life a new poetry of the heart, with multiple resonances of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rubén Darío, García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, or Vicente Huidobro.
Public acceptance was not immediate, and they themselves did not seem aware that they were viewed as being sent by Divine Providence
to clean poetry’s house. But Don Baldomero Sanín Cano, the most respected essayist and critic of those years, hastened to write a categorical essay to thwart any attempt against Valencia. His proverbial moderation went astray. Among many definitive judgments, he
wrote that Valencia had “come into possession of ancient knowledge in order to know the soul of times distant in the past, and he ponders contemporary texts in order to discover, by analogy, the entire soul of man.” He consecrated Valencia once again as a timeless poet with no frontiers and placed him among those who, “like Lucretius, Dante, Goethe, preserved his body in order to save his soul.” More
than one person must have thought then that with friends like this, Valencia did not need enemies.

Eduardo Carranza replied to Sanín Cano with an article that said it all, beginning with the title: “A Case of Bardolatry.” It was the first well-aimed assault to situate Valencia within his proper limits and bring his pedestal down to its correct place and size. Carranza accused Valencia of having
lit not a flame of the spirit in Colombia but rather an orthopedics of words, and he defined his verses as those of an artist who was precious, frigid, accomplished, and a painstaking carver. His conclusion was a question to himself that in essence was like one of his good poems: “If poetry does not make my blood run faster, open sudden windows for me onto the mysterious, help me discover the world,
accompany this desolate heart in solitude and in love, in joy and in enmity, what good is poetry to me?” And he concluded: “For me—blasphemer that I am!—Valencia is barely a good poet.”

The publication of “A Case of Bardolatry” in the “Lecturas Dominicales” section of
El Tiempo,
which had a wide circulation at the time, caused a social upheaval. It also had the prodigious result of producing
a thorough examination of poetry in Colombia from its origins, which perhaps had not been done with any seriousness since Don Juan de Castellanos wrote the 150,000 hendecasyllables of his
Elegies to Illustrious Men of the Indies.

From then on the sky was the limit for poetry. Not only for The New Ones, who became fashionable, but for others who
emerged later and jostled and shoved for their place.
Poetry became so popular that today it is not possible to understand to what extent you lived for each issue of “Lecturas Dominicales,” published by Carranza, or
Sábado,
published at the time by Carlos Martín, our former rector at the
liceo.
In addition to his poetry, with his glory Carranza established a way of being a poet at six in the afternoon on the Carrera Séptima in Bogotá, which was like
walking in a shop window ten blocks long holding a book in the hand that rested on your heart. He was a model for his generation, which created a school in the next, each in its own way.

In the middle of the year Pablo Neruda came to Bogotá, convinced that poetry had to be a political weapon. In his Bogotán
tertulias
he learned what kind of reactionary Laureano Gómez was, and as a farewell he
composed, almost as fast as his pen could write, three punitive sonnets in his honor, the first quatrain setting the tone for all of them:

In spite of his right-wing sympathies and personal friendship with Laureano Gómez, Carranza
highlighted the sonnets in his literary pages, more as a journalistic scoop than a political proclamation. But the negative response was almost unanimous. Above all because of the illogicality of publishing them in the paper of a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like the former president Eduardo Santos, who was as opposed to the retrograde thought of Laureano Gómez as he was to Pablo Neruda’s revolutionary
ideas. The noisiest reaction came from those who could not tolerate a foreigner permitting himself that kind of abuse. The mere fact that three casuistic sonnets, more ingenious than poetic, could set off such a storm was a heartening symptom of the power of poetry during those years. In any event, Laureano Gómez himself, who was then president of the Republic, later prohibited Neruda from
entering Colombia, as did General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in his day, but he was in
Cartagena and Buenaventura, ports of call for the steamships between Chile and Europe, on several occasions. For the Colombian friends to whom he announced his visit, each stopover on the round trip was a reason for stupendous celebration.

When I enrolled in the faculty of law in February 1947, my identification
with the Stone and Sky group remained unshaken. Although I had met its most notable members in Carlos Martín’s house in Zipaquirá, I did not have the audacity to remind even Carranza of that, and he was the most approachable. On one occasion I happened to see him in the Librería Grancolombia, so close to me and so accessible that I greeted him as an admirer. His response was very cordial but he did
not recognize me. On the other hand, on another occasion, Maestro León de Greiff got up from his table at El Molino and greeted me at mine when someone told him I had published stories in
El Espectador,
and he promised to read them. Sad to say, a few weeks later the popular uprising of April 9 took place, and I had to leave the still-smoking city. When I returned after four years, El Molino had
disappeared under its ashes, and the maestro had moved with all his household goods and his court of friends to the café El Automático, where we became friends of books and
aguardiente,
and he taught me to move chessmen without art or good fortune.

My friends from an earlier time found it incomprehensible that I would persist in writing stories, and even I could not explain it in a country where
the greatest art was poetry. I learned this when I was very young through the success of “Miseria humana,” a popular poem sold in folded sheets of coarse wrapping paper or recited for two centavos in the markets and cemeteries of Caribbean towns. The novel, on the other hand, was limited. After
María,
by Jorge Isaacs, many had been written with no great resonance. José María Vargas Vila had been
an unusual phenomenon with his fifty-two novels aimed at the heart of the poor. A tireless traveler, his excessive baggage consisted of his own books that were displayed and bought up by passionate readers in the entrances to the hotels of Latin America and Spain.
Aura, or The Violets,
his stellar novel, broke more hearts than many better ones by his contemporaries.

The only novels that survived
their own time were
The Ram,
written between 1600 and 1638 during the colonial period by the Spaniard Juan Rodríguez Freyle, a tale so unrestrained and free about the history of Nueva Granada
^*
that it became a masterpiece of fiction;
María,
by Jorge Isaacs, in 1867;
The Vortex,
by José Eustasio Rivera, in 1924,
The Marquise of Yolombó,
by Tomás Carrasquilla, in 1926, and
Four Years Aboard Myself,
by Eduardo Zalamea, in 1934. None of them had even glimpsed the glory possessed, deservedly or not, by so many poets. On the other hand, the short story—with an antecedent as distinguished as Carrasquilla himself, the great writer of Antioquia—had come to grief on a craggy and soulless rhetoric.

The proof that my vocation was to be only a narrator was the stream of verses I left behind at the
liceo,
unsigned or signed with pseudonyms, because I never had the intention of dying on their account. Even more: when I published my first stories in
El Espectador,
many people who had no right to were challenging the genre. Today I think this is understandable because from many points of view, life in Colombia was still in the nineteenth century. Above all in the lugubrious Bogotá of the 1940s,
still nostalgic for the colonial period, when I matriculated without vocation or desire in the faculty of law at the Universidad Nacional.

To confirm this it was enough to sink into the nerve center of Carrera Séptima and Avenida Jiménez de Quesada, baptized by Bogotán excess as the best corner in the world. When the public clock in the tower of the Church of San Francisco struck twelve noon,
men stopped on the street or interrupted their conversation in the café to set their watches by the official hour of the church. Around that intersection, and on the adjacent streets, were the crowded places where businessmen, politicians, journalists—and poets, of course—met twice a day, all of them dressed in black down to the soles of their feet, like our lord King Don Felipe IV.